Thief Of My Beating Heart
by liliths
Summary: A disgraced security consultant. A chemist who never asked for any of this. An infamous thief with an edge for disguise. A part-time mountain guide. A wine connoisseur on the run. To be honest, Victor thinks Detroit has never been more exciting. Thieves AU.
1. Chapter One: An Honest Job

**Hey, it's me again. Catch me digging myself into this hellhole ice skating show even further by writing hellhole of a multichap. I haven't written one of these since the dark days, oh man. I might've forgotten how to, and I can already feel the regret coming on. Word count: 3,102.**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own jack squat. Special thanks to zero (octocelot) for beta reading!**

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Chapter One: An Honest Job

"Need a refill?"

Victor looked up at the question, then glanced back down at his empty glass. He hadn't remembered when and how he gulped that one down, too. The bartender waited expectantly, bottle of alcohol poised above Victor's glass.

"No thanks," he replied.

"Suit yourself." The bartender moved on, the bottle of cinnamon-colored liquid vanishing with him.

He glared in the direction of the retreating bartender with the bottle of sloshing Irish whiskey. A part of Victor wanted the extra glass. Hell, a part of him _needed_ it. A part of him wanted to call the bartender right back and watch the glass fill with sparkling liquid once again, then swallow it all in one long gulp. And yet, every sensible fiber of Victor's mind told him that he needed to ration his money carefully. If he saved up enough over the next couple of weeks and if luck was on his side, he could book a cheap flight back to St. Petersburg by the end of the month.

 _And what would be waiting for me there?_ Victor thought bitterly. _A pile of debts and rows of graves._

He tipped the glass in a futile effort to get the last of the drops and sighed, pushing himself away from the polished bar counter. It was time to go. He wasn't sure what was going to happen to the cash he kept close to his chest if he stayed there a few minutes longer.

Before he could step away, another man plopped down in the seat next to him, chair creaking.

"I'll have two of whatever this gentleman was having before," he called to the bartender. Then, turning to Victor, "Would you mind if we had a little chat, Mr. Nikiforov?"

"What?" Victor snapped, slightly irritated by the interruption and even more confused that the stranger knew his name.

"I'm buying you a drink," the man said, gesturing to the chair Victor occupied seconds before. "Would you mind sitting down?"

Narrowing his eyes, Victor lowered himself back into the seat. The wise thing to do would be to simply leave the stranger and head back home, but one glance at the bartender refilling his glass told Victor he was not leaving anytime soon. With a sigh, Victor looked the stranger up and down in between sips, trying to gauge what he kind of person he was dealing with—a lawyer, a teacher, a pirate?

The stranger's appearance, unfortunately, didn't have anything interesting to offer. To Victor, he looked as ordinary as ordinary people got, with a patch of graying hair and brown eyes the color of Victor's whiskey. The suit he wore was crisp and immaculately tailored, but Victor judged it to be on the cheap side as far as suits went. Stylish, but not _too_ stylish. Handsome, but not _too_ handsome. Old, but not _too_ old. In fact, Victor imagined he could have bumped into him walking down the streets and never remembered the encounter. Nothing about the man _stuck out_.

 _I should probably be concerned by that,_ he told himself. _A man who doesn't stick in your mind always has something to hide._

"Well?" Victor prompted after a moment of silence and whiskey-sipping. "If you don't have anything to say, I'm going to thank you for the free drink and leave."

The man smiled nervously and ran a hand through his clearly-receding hairline. "I apologize for confronting you like this, Mr. Nikiforov."

Victor smiled dryly. "Let me rephrase my question, mister...?"

"Eddington," the man supplied. "Stanley Eddington."

"Well, Mr. Stanley Eddington, what I meant to ask was what do you _want_ from me?"

"Do people normally approach you only when they want something?"

Victor bit back a sarcastic response and took another draw from the glass.

Eddington sighed. "Alright, Mr. Nikiforov. I'll cut to the chase. I came here tonight because I am in need of your help. I'm glad I finally managed to find you, to tell you the truth. The locals say you're quite the regular at this bar, but I haven't seen you around here for the past week or so."

"Been saving money," Victor replied easily.

"So I figured. Since you tell me to be straightforward, I won't beat around the bush. I'm looking to hire you, Mr. Nikiforov, and I'm prepared to offer a generous sum for your services. A hundred thousand dollars, in fact."

Victor sat up a little straighter at those words. The wiser part of him said that money like that didn't come without a price, but the more desperate, greedy part of his mind wanted to shake on the stranger's deal right then and there. Money like that could keep him going, could pay for all his debts and a flight; it also wasn't the kind of cash to land in your lap out of sheer luck. Eddington must've sensed his interest as well, smiling before he continued the explanation.

"I know your profession is security," Eddington added. "A security consultant of sorts."

"Ex-security consultant," Victor corrected.

"Ex-security consultant," he amended with a dismissive wave of the hand. "But they say you're still active and looking for the right employer. Everyone I've spoken to tells me you can figure out what someone needs to install to protect their belongings just from one look—software, cameras, personnel, sensors, and everything else that comes along with the package. Someone once said you could build a labyrinth of security out of nothing. But strengthening security protocols is not what I need. Mr. Nikiforov, I was wondering if you could circumvent security systems for me. You see—"

"The answer's already no," Victor interrupted, holding up a hand. Sure, Eddington had been right in his assessment of Victor's skills. And sure, Victor _had_ taken up multiple jobs around the city for rich people who hadn't bothered to give him time of day after he lost his old job. But breaking and entering, or "circumventing security" as Eddington had put it, was not within any of Victor's skill sets, nor was it something he felt morally inclined to do despite his desperation. "Those are two entirely different things."

"How different can they be?" Eddington pressed, desperation creeping into his voice. "Please, Mr. Nikiforov, you're my only hope."

"Just hire a proper thief," Victor replied. "I won't rat you out. And a proper thief could do the job without getting you busted in the process."

"I need _you,_ Mr. Nikiforov. I've heard stories about how foolish people who hire _proper_ thieves end up double-crossed and triple-crossed until their bodies are buried six feet under. You're not a thief, Mr. Nikiforov, even though I'm asking you to be one. You're an honest man. And I need an honest man for an honest job."

Victor laughed. "Stealing is not an honest job, Mr. Eddington."

"No, it's not," Eddington admitted. "But you can't steal something you owned in the first place. God's honest truth—I'm only asking you to retrieve something of mine, Mr. Nikiforov. Something I owned until very recently."

The man sitting across from Victor grimaced.

"I'm just a simple businessman, Mr. Nikiforov," he continued. "I own a small corporation for agriculture research—Defense Green, if you want to look it up. Now, I'm not rich, I don't have the connections or the money. I just have a small team of researchers working on ways to prevent crops from decaying, developing pesticides, battling disease strains. We turn over a sizeable profit with everything new we develop, but we probably don't make more than the average upstanding citizen. So please understand how serious the situation is if I'm forced to offer you a hundred thousand dollars for this job. This is a big risk."

Victor downed the rest of his drink. "Still don't see where I come in."

"Two weeks ago, someone broke into our research building. Now, like I said, we just don't have the resources or the brains to have a high-level security system. Most of my guys are just biologists and chemical engineers."

"Should've hired me then," Victor commented matter-of-factly.

Eddington ignored his comment. "A rival corporation broke into our database and took nearly two terabytes worth of valuable research on our newest project, then broke into our labs and took three sample vials. Whoever they hired, whatever they used, they wiped our systems completely after the job was done and smashed the remaining samples in the lab, even the ones that didn't have anything to do with the new project. All the work is gone."

"How do you know it was a rival corporation?"

"They announced the exact same project just a week ago—a strain of wheat that would be resistant to a certain virus. I won't bore you with the details. They even showed a little preview of the plans. I recognized our work immediately."

"Sounds like a job for the court."

"Definitely not!" Eddington ran another hand through his hair. It seemed to be receding with every passing second, and Victor resisted the urge to run a hand through his own hair to check if it was doing the same. "The courts are too slow, and we need the plans back immediately if we are to stay afloat. Besides, our competitors will most likely have every county judge in their pockets by now."

"Such faith in our justice system."

"Simply facts, Mr. Nikiforov. You of all people should know that."

Victor chuckled dryly. "Anything can be a fact if you tell it the right way."

 _Or if the people spreading the facts are very, very good liars,_ he thought bitterly.

"Please," Eddington begged again. "I already have a lot of information for you to make the job successful. And I trust a man with your talents can easily do the rest."

Could he do it? Well, Victor was almost certain that even with his experience, breaking into a high-security building would be a bit of a challenge, but not entirely impossible. Security systems were made to be broken into, after all. He had learned that over the years. The trick to creating good security wasn't to make a building impenetrable but to stay a step ahead of the game, to stay smarter than the thieves—almost like a chess match.

But _should_ he do it? It wasn't as if his debts were paying themselves, and only a fool would turn down a hundred thousand dollars only a few feet from grasp. But if Victor had learned something from the last couple months, it was that money, no matter how little or how much, always came with a price.

"Look," he sighed at last. "Mr. Eddington, your offer is highly tempting, and there's no denying I need some cold, hard cash. But if I screw up and get caught, I'm headed straight for jail, and I doubt you'd have the thought or care to bail me out. You wouldn't want to associate yourself with a criminal in the public eye. I value money, yes, but I value being able to walk around these godforsaken streets more."

For the second time that night, Victor stood up to leave.

"Perhaps you should just find yourself a proper thief," he suggested, casting Eddington a look that was a mix of pity and resentment. Then as a bitter afterthought, "There are loads of them among Detroit."

 _And most of them are dressed in fancy business suits,_ he thought to himself.

"It's truly a shame then, Mr. Nikiforov, for you to leave without hearing the rest of my offer."

"You can raise your price, but the answer's still no."

"Not money then—"

"Well, you certainly can't sway me over with another drink."

"Not money or drinks—"

"I don't operate on the satisfaction of helping the victims of this world either."

"What would you say to revenge?"

Victor froze.

"Yes," Eddington continued, grasping at Victor's interest eagerly. "Revenge. It's a common enough story around the streets. Might even be an urban legend of some sorts in the future. Everyone knows what you did for that company, the lengths you went to protect it from the thieves. And yet when you'd done all you could, they just—"

"I'm going to have to stop you right there," Victor interrupted, feeling his hands clench into fists.

There were many things he could tolerate—physical pain, rainy weather, a bad hangover. Hell, he could even sit at the bar counter and listen to Eddington babble about stuff he honestly couldn't give a shit about. He could be accused of being a thief, of thinking like one, of being a useless drunk and a downright criminal. People could even poke and prod him about his financial state, but he could grit his teeth and sit through it just fine. But no one, and Victor meant _no one on the entire godforsaken planet,_ could try to talk to him about... _that._

"I'm thinking three things right now. One, I haven't paid for the drinks I got earlier yet. Two, because of the alcohol you yourself so generously provided, I'm not sure if I have much self-restraint left in me. And three, if I punch you in the throat eight or nine times—and we're coming up on that part of the conversation real quick—I get kicked from this bar without paying for a single drop of alcohol tonight and leave you to deal with the bills."

Victor shifted his weight and tilted his head. He blinked and tried to clear the red threatening to engulf his vision.

"The only thing holding me back is that fact that I can't come back to this bar if I do that," he admitted. "So I would highly, _highly_ recommend you stop talking and consider yourself lucky."

Eddington flinched back, recoiling in his chair. Victor simply stood motionless, hands still balled at his sides.

"I meant no offense, Mr. Nikiforov," he explained quickly.

"We don't mean for a great deal, Mr. Eddington." Victor laughed hollowly. "A great deal still ends up happening anyway."

"I only meant that it would be some kind of—" Eddington waved his hands, trying to find the right words "—some kind of poetic justice if you took this job and succeeded. The group who stole from my company is a subsidiary of the same holding company as the...as the bank."

He looked scared to finish the sentence, and Victor didn't blame him. A second ago, he had been ready to make certain the guy would never be able to walk properly again.

Slowly, the words turned over in Victor's mind.

 _The same holding company,_ he thought to himself. _The same company. The same managers and the same CEO's and the same officials and the same board members. The same people who looked down at you. The same people who hid behind their smiles and told you to get the job done. The same people who tried to kill you._

As if voicing his thoughts, Eddington cleared his throat nervously and said, "Mr. Nikiforov, how would you like to get back at the people who tried to get you killed?"

 _The same people._

Victor could almost see their leering faces—smiles that never quite touched their eyes, mouths turned up in sneers, greedy eyes that did not reflect the fluorescent ceiling lights. He could remember their names, had their names seared into his mind along with their faces. His thoughts raced like scuttling centipedes, but one particular face and one particular name came to him through the indiscernible tangle.

 _Blackwell,_ Victor thought with a rush of mad glee. _Finally, Blackwell will reap what he sowed._

And before he could give it a second thought, Victor found himself saying to Eddington, "I'll do it."

A unreadable look passed over Eddington's plain features—surprise, relief, perhaps even shock. Victor couldn't care less about what the businessman thought, his thoughts turning to the only goal he had in mind.

 _Blackwell._

"I'll get your research and samples back under two conditions," he amended.

"Name them," Eddington responded promptly.

"One, I kill Blackwell."

Eddington's face darkened.

Victor simply shrugged. "If I run into him, I kill Blackwell. You either let me kill him or the deal's off."

"I'm not hiring you to be some kind of murderer, Mr. Nikiforov!"

 _And I'm not hiring you to give me sermons,_ he wanted to shoot back.

"Then consider it as merely a side product of the job. Thieves run into people on the job all the time, and people need to be silent for the job to be done."

Eddington grimaced, seemed to think it over in his head for a long time, then shook his head in resignation. He glared at Victor for a long while before giving him a small nod. "If you fail, you are going to take full responsibility then. I won't be accused of hiring someone for murder."

"So we have a deal then?" Victor asked, extending his right hand.

He was ready to get this over with, ready to seal the deal. Perhaps it was the aftertaste of the whiskey, but Victor swore he could already taste the sweet stickiness of revenge on the tip of his tongue.

"Your second condition?" Eddington replied cautiously, his hand hovering.

Victor snorted in exasperation before grabbing at Eddington's hand. He had a surprisingly strong grip, and Victor returned the firm hold as they shook. One hundred thousand dollars and the promise of revenge—or the promise of justice, depending on who you asked. It was all his for the taking with a shake of a hand.

"Buy me another drink."


	2. Chapter Two: A Good Thief

**Every character's age is boosted by about ten years. Except Yurio. He still young. Also, with the way things are going right now and with what I've written so far, I think I will try (keyword here is try) to update every Saturday or Sunday. That might change once the school year rolls around, but we'll see.** **Word count: 4,728.**

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Chapter Two: A Good Thief

Victor remembered the exact moment when he first stepped into Detroit. It was not when he first stepped off the airplane that took him across the planet from St. Petersburg. Not when he went through customs. Not when he stumbled out of the airport and into a taxi. Not when he collapsed into his new apartment—having no furniture, he and the young boy travelling with him simply collapsed onto the floor.

No, Victor first stepped into Detroit when he emerged from the apartment, jet-lagged and driven by hunger. He took Yuri's hand in his and told him not to run off. Victor knew city could be dangerous, especially for small children who didn't speak much English.

 _This city reeks,_ he thought. _Like a sewer that clogged and spilled onto the streets._

"You'll get used to it," laughed a large woman from behind a food stand when he asked her why it smelled so bad.

Victor didn't _want_ to get used to it. He didn't like the dampness, the perpetual smell of mold and mildew and whatever else the city had to offer. He had paid good money to make sure he and Yuri got to live in a decent apartment, one with a functioning heating system, a working stove, and rust-free pipes. He paid for Yuri to attend school, then paid another handful for his school supplies and new clothes. Victor had paid and paid and paid and paid, digging himself further and further into debt with only the promise that he would begin work for the company and eventually be able to return the money.

Later, Victor often wondered what would've happened if he hadn't taken the job and stayed in St. Petersburg. Or even if he had accepted a different offer with a less enticing pay.

Somehow, he doubted the outcome would've been much different either way.

-::-

"Yuuri Katsuki," the man in front of him introduced himself, sticking out his hand. Then, shakily, "Yuuri with two U's and an I."

Victor didn't shake it, just took in his supposed partner in crime from head to toe. He narrowed his eyes as they travelled over the stranger, the chemist Eddington said would "help" Victor in his job of breaking into the research center of Massive Dynamic, alleged thieves of highly-valued research.

"Massive Dynamic is owned by Blackwell," Eddington had explained. "It's highly protected, no thanks to you, and their research center is also extensive. There are probably at least half a hundred projects that will be there. You're going to need help with identifying the right research and the right samples."

If it had been up to Victor, he would've set the entire building to the torch. But Eddington wanted his research, and he had hired Victor to be a thief, not an arsonist. Besides, a strange, cruel part of Victor wanted to see Blackwell in financial ruin and humiliated in the public eye before the end. A burnt-down building could be covered by all kinds of insurance—though the loss would still be substantial. Stealing his prized project, a strain of wheat resistant to stem rust, and returning the research to the rightful owners would be the first part in humiliating Blackwell and bringing him one step further to ruin.

So Victor agreed.

The chemist would go with him into the building, but Victor could not ensure his safety. They were to meet in a little alleyway a block away from the target, then Victor would head in first. That had been the other reason why Eddington sought him out—he had designed Massive Dynamic's security himself while he was with the holding company, and Victor knew the layout like the back of his hand.

And yet, "Yuuri with two U's and an I" looked much too young and much too innocent to be doing any kind of breaking and entering. Messy black hair, watery brown eyes that reflected the moonlight, and a blue jacket that hung loosely around his narrow shoulders. The chemist shivered in the cold night air, drawing the overlarge jacket around him. He barely came up to Victor's shoulder, and if he didn't know any better, Victor would've mistaken the researcher for a college student or maybe even a high school student.

 _Why did Eddington pick him?_ Victor thought bitterly. _Why did he have to pick someone with that name? Surely he must know if he heard the stories._

"There must be other qualified chemists out there," he voiced out loud to Yuuri. "Why did that Eddington guy pick you?"

Yuuri turned dark red. "Is there something wrong with me?"

"No, should I be worried?" Victor replied. Then, he snorted. "I suppose Eddington was smart. You still look like a minor."

"I'm thirty-three," he stuttered back, turning even darker.

 _Just four years younger than me,_ Victor told himself. _But he looks a lot younger. He doesn't look like he should be breaking into a high-security research building owned by a billionaire plutocrat at three in the morning. He looks like he shouldn't be near any of this._

"Ever steal something? Break into a building?"

Yuuri shook his head. Then, he added weakly, "But I have some other skills."

With a sigh, Victor turned away. The plan had been simple enough if he were to break into the building by himself, though still a bit of a challenge. But now, with someone inexperienced there, Victor didn't need just good knowledge of the security system and a few skills—he needed luck, and lots of it, to get them both in and out of the building. Admittedly, the job would've been made easier if Victor had hired a third person, but he had no intentions of trying to find a proper thief to help the job along. No, this job was his and his alone. His revenge and his revenge alone.

 _Blackwell will pay tonight,_ he thought as he tilted his head back to look at night sky.

The moon was out tonight, high in the sky like a giant lantern, and Victor could see the outline of Massive Dynamic looming overhead. A blight on the moon. With a sudden surge of rage, Victor wanted to erase the outline of the building, paint over it with a white brush until the moon was whole and circular again.

"Fifteen minutes," he told Yuuri, checking his watch. "In fifteen minutes, I'm going in. You're staying out here for another twenty. If I'm not there opening the door for you, make a run for it. You know where to run, right?"

"I'm not an idiot," he protested weakly.

Victor shook his head. Running from the rain or running for fun was a lot different from running for life. "Wasn't calling you one."

As a last-minute check, Victor made sure he had everything he needed. He felt the warm lump in his overcoat's right pocket, the solid rock in his left, the tightness of his shoelaces, the lockpicks up his sleeves, the gloves on his hands to prevent leaving fingerprints, and the wallet with his now-expired identification card. He rubbed the key card against his phone another solid twenty times, ran through the camera positions and rotations in his head, the security patrols that happened at night. He had a small window for the plan to work. Small, but doable. He had checked over it thousands of times in the past weeks of planning, and at least another half hundred times just in the past few hours.

He bent down to touch his toes, stretching.

 _Five minutes to go._

As he straightened, he realized Yuuri was giving him a skeptical look.

"Spit it out, Yuuri with two U's and an I."

"Why are you wearing that?" he asked, giving Victor's tan overcoat and slightly-loose suit a nod. "Don't thieves usually wear all black?"

"I'm not a thief," Victor corrected.

Yuuri snorted, but he didn't press the issue. "How are you going to break in then?"

Victor smiled. "Thieves break in by finding entrances. But like I said, I'm not a thief. I _make_ entrances. I'm going walk in through the front door."

The chemist just looked confused, but Victor was out of time to explain. He tapped his watch, reminded Yuuri to wait twenty minutes before going to the front door, then rounded the corner and took off. The moon glowed brightly in the night sky, and the watch on Victor's wrist began its countdown.

-::-

Victor came to a halt in the dark alleyway behind the building and glanced at his watch. It had taken him three minutes and thirty seconds to zigzag through the alleyways. One minute and thirty seconds to go until the plan kicked into action.

The back of the building was guarded by two domed security cameras on either end of the wall and pressure-sensitive alarms that went off if someone tried to open the back door from the outside. A third security camera hung over the back door, ever-watchful. There were no fire escapes or ladders, just the door and a long stretch of unscalable, smooth granite broken only by a singular vibration-sensitive window three stories up.

A fool might've looked at the back of the building and chalked it up to a lost cause. A fool would've taken one look at the cameras and the unscalable wall and looked for a different entrance. An even more foolish thief would've tried to disable the cameras, with bullets or rocks or by hacking into the building itself (which would've been hard enough to begin with). That would set the internal alarm system off, and security would come running out of the building. Perhaps, a better thief might've wondered why there were _two_ domed cameras on either side instead of one at the center, but still would've left with no idea of how to break in.

Hidden in the shadows of the alleyway, Victor smiled to himself. The cameras couldn't pick him up in the alleyway, and in a moment, they wouldn't be able to pick him up at all.

Victor ran through the capabilities of the dome analog cameras through his head. Infrared compatible, clear color picture correction, 23x zoom, 685 TVL. All housed within that small little dome. All of which were useful, to a certain extent, but the most important thing the darkened glass offered was keeping the direction they were pointed in hidden from thieves.

 _180 degrees rotation capabilities,_ Victor thought. _It can't point everywhere at once, so it rotates from side to side._

Which was why there had to be two, one to point in either direction the entire time. One on either side of the building while the camera hovering above the door was perpetually fixed on the entrance. Victor had seen to the programming of the cameras, told the company to get the dome analog security cameras instead of the traditional infrared cameras used by other buildings in Detroit. Some had laughed at him, saying those were for school buildings, but Victor had insisted. You did not want to give away your play before the game started. If a thief could see where the camera was pointed, a thief could dodge out of its range.

Every quarter hour, the dome analog cameras on either side rotated 180 degrees. Always in sync, always exactly on the quarter hour.

Currently, they both would be pointing in the general direction towards the mouth of the alleyway Victor lurked in, smack in the middle between the two cameras. But when the watch on Victor's hand hit 3:15 AM, they would rotate to point away from the alley, hiding Victor from view. The surge of power to the two cameras on either side would momentarily black out the one hovering over the back door, and those precious ten seconds would be Victor's window.

Not much room for error, but Victor liked the odds.

The watch on his hand beeped, and Victor silenced it with the press of a button. Holding his breath, he waited a second longer before taking off. In a flash, he sprinted from the alleyway and hurled himself at the back door with as much strength as he could muster, using his momentum to smash into the steel door like a battering ram.

His shoulder hurt more than he would've liked to admit, and Victor staggered backwards from the force of the impact, nearly knocked off his feet.

"Shit," he muttered under his breath, clutching his shoulder. At least _that_ should've set off the pressure sensors.

Knowing his time was short, Victor sprinted away from the entrance before the security camera above could flicker back to life and catch a glimpse of his face. Despite the throbbing of his shoulder and the pounding of his heart, Victor felt a wild surge of glee as he moved to the air duct a few meters from the door, conveniently out of sight from all three cameras until the next rotation.

 _Step one is done,_ he thought as he pried the grate away easily. He had removed the screws two days before to make sure the second step took as little time as possible.

The air duct would've been a thief's second way in, if said thief could even figure out how to bypass the cameras. However, Victor knew better than to try to crawl his way into the vents. He wouldn't have fit in them in the first place, but there were even more difficulties inside the small tunnel. About two meters in, laser detectors were installed for the sole purpose of keeping out the thieves with knacks for crawling their way through the dark.

Carefully, Victor reached into his coat's right pocket and withdrew the warm lump he had been hiding. The chickadee he gently cradled in his gloved hands gave him a disgruntled chirp.

"Sorry," Victor whispered as he released the bird into the vents before shutting the vent again, leaving the gate just a little askew.

Phase two done. The young black-capped chickadee had a wingspan just shy of seven and a half inches, small enough to fly in the vents, big enough to trip the lasers, and common enough for Victor to get his hands on in time.

Quickly, Victor ran back a few paces, still out of sight of the cameras. He had less than thirty seconds before the security guards came running, but there was still one more thing needed to be done.

 _I hope my aim is still good,_ he prayed silently as he hurled rock stored in his other pocket at the third-story window.

Victor didn't bother to see if his aim was true; he was already running for the alleyway when the sweet sound of shattering glass reached his ears.

-::-

Mind and feet both racing, Victor allowed himself a moment to relish in his victory as he weaved through the alleyways before coming to a halt in front of the Massive Dynamic building, hiding underneath the shadows of a tree on the sidewalk. The easy part had been setting off all the alarms—though even that had been difficult with the tight timing. Now came the hard part.

Cursing his already-receding hairline, Victor ran a hand through his sheaf of silver hair and tried to smooth it down as much as possible. He tugged at his overcoat, brushed the dirt off of his knees and elbows, and took a deep breath.

 _Look respectable,_ he told himself. _Respectable and angry._

The ten-minute wait felt like an eternity, and Victor couldn't have been more relieved when the watch on his wrist beeped a second time.

Taking in another deep breath, Victor emerged from the shadows. Step by purposeful step, he walked up to the building and threw open the glass double doors, each one swinging inward to reveal Victor in the middle.

The building itself cost a fortune to build, and it required another fortune to secure. When he had first visited the place, Victor had been struck by its beauty—the granite floor and glass walls and every polished surface glittering like the building was its own supernova. Even the little orange trees in every corner and in front of the elevators were real.

 _Expensive doesn't mean invulnerable,_ Victor reminded himself.

He spotted the frenzied looking security guard at the polished granite desk, talking frantically into the headset. The security guard was still young and new to the job, just as Victor had anticipated. They would always stick someone new to one of the more boring jobs before moving the employee up the line, more of a receptionist than an actual security guard. Victor was relying on that tonight. That and the fact that it was a Saturday morning, smack in the middle of the graveyard shift.

Victor smiled to himself. When one of the numerous sensors was tripped, the front desk was simply alerted. They would send another guard to check out the disturbance. But when three or more sensors were tripped, the building went into a different alarm mode. Specifically, an alarm that could not be turned off by the front desk. An insufferably loud and raucous alarm that sounded more like a school bell than anything else. And it had been ringing for the past ten minutes while Victor waited outside, watching the security guard at the front desk stew in the chaos and noise.

Saturday morning in the early hours before dawn, new to the job, with an insufferably loud alarm ringing and echoing through the entire building. Anyone in that position would be grasping for any solution—even a silver-haired, ex-security consultant solution.

"What the hell is going on here?" Victor bellowed with as much authority as he could muster, marching his way towards the front desk. "You!"

The security guard practically squeaked. "Yes, sir!"

Victor could get used to this.

"Well?" he yelled. "Why are all the alarms going off?"

Before the security guard could answer, Victor reached into his wallet and pulled out his identification card, one that showed his position as an expert with clearance to highest-level security for all facilities belonging to the holding company. He waved it in front of the guard's face, and he was glad when the man paled. Clearly, he had missed the expiration date in shock and had not been there long enough to recognize Victor's name. Victor doubted many employees would recognize his name in the first place, but it was still a good precaution to make sure a new guy was at the front desk.

 _They keep a skeleton crew at night,_ Victor told himself as he pocketed the card. _Skeleton crew means this is the only guard I'll have to deal with since the other ones are all running about outside._

"What's with the noise?" he asked again. "I got dragged out of bed for this!"

"We're working on it, sir!" he answered, then spoke into his headset. "Someone threw a rock through the window and a bird got into the vents."

"A bird," Victor repeated, trying his best to glower.

"Yes, sir," the guard squeaked. "Bird."

"You're telling me I was called out at three in the morning for a _bird."_

Positively petrified, the guard gave frightened nod.

"Well, then, what are you waiting for?" Victor yelled over the alarm, throwing his hands up in exasperation. "If it was an accident, get me up to the control room and let me turn this cursed bell off. Chop chop!"

The guard squeaked again and whirled on his heels, scrambling towards the elevator. Victor followed, strolling right past the metal detectors and the first security checkpoint, making sure his heels clicked against the granite floor as ominously as possible. The poor guard was going to lead him right past all the checkpoints, and from there, it would be easy. Or at least Victor hoped.

The elevator gave a ding, and they entered. Thirty floors and a basement, just as the building plans indicated. The guard scanned his card and punched a button.

"Floors above ten are for research, yes?" Victor asked cautiously.

The security guard nodded, eager to please. "Floors eleven through twenty are just offices. Twenty-one through thirty are actual labs."

"Smart," Victor commented. "If the labs catch on fire, everyone would still have a way down."

"Yeah, no fire escape." The guard gave a nervous laugh. "Can't make it for the thieves, right?"

"No, you can't," Victor replied. He gave the security guard the best look of admiration he could muster without laughing. "And it's a damn thing we have people like you in here at night."

"Yeah," the guard continued as the elevator came to a halt on the eighth floor with another ding. Apparently Victor had gotten him into a talking mood now that he wasn't practically quaking in his polished shoes. "Even though there aren't a lot of people here at night, someone's got to make sure the building's secure."

"Who comes here at night?"

"Oh, mostly just a few researchers working on deadlines," he supplied quickly. "And some international scientists from Hong Kong or London or something."

"I see."

The guard scanned his own card at a door. It clicked and swung open as the card was approved, and after they were inside, the doors slammed shut. The sounds of the alarm muted behind them.

 _Good,_ thought Victor. _Get me through all the checkpoints with that little card of yours._

Inside the cold server room, Victor strolled through the familiar shelves and wiring until he found what he was looking for. The computer that he would need to turn off the alarms and to find the files he needed for the job. Eddington would have his data back, and Victor would be one step closer to taking back what he lost. Still, there was one more part of his plan he needed to get right.

Victor prayed the insufferable alarm and sleep deprivation had made the security guard willing to cut corners to turn the damn thing off. Slowly, he sat down at the computer and pulled out his expired identification again. Holding his breath, Victor tried to scan it to gain access to the computer, anxiously awaiting the outcome.

The computer didn't respond.

Victor tried again. Nothing.

"Shit," he cursed, glancing over his shoulder at the hovering security guard.

 _If he asks to see my card to verify it again, this whole thing is doomed._

"What's wrong?" the guard asked, and Victor's heart nearly leapt out of his chest.

"It's corrupted," he said, remembering all the times he rubbed the card against his phone, trying to corrupt the magnetic strip. An expired card would trigger yet another alarm system, but a corrupted one—one that you rubbed or kept close to other strong magnets—would have no effect. The system wouldn't risk setting an alarm off at a high-clearance business person who had been careless with where to put a key card.

"Here," the security guard provided, handing Victor his own card. "Use mine."

And just like that, Victor's breathing eased.

"Thank you," he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. "I must've kept mine too close to my phone or something."

"No worries. It happens to the best of us."

Victor smiled to himself as he scanned the card and handed it back to the guard behind him. As expected, the computer flickered to life.

"Did you tell the others I'm already here?" he asked. He didn't want some loon to actually call an alarm company and have a real specialist show up just in time to ruin Victor's plan. He knew most alarm companies did not operate at such ungodly hours of the night, had counted on it, but it was best to make sure.

"No, I didn't. Didn't even call the alarm company before you got here."

"We get notified when a high-priority building like this gets into trouble. I was the closest one in the area, so they sent me." A flimsy lie at best, considering how quickly Victor had entered the scene, but he hoped the security guard wouldn't think too deeply on it.

Victor entered another command into the computer system, and with the press of a key, the din behind them ceased. The security guard let out a deep sigh of relief.

"I have to do some more work," Victor told him. "I'll see myself out when I'm finished. You should go check out the third floor or something. Go make the rounds and tell the others it's nothing to worry about. If it was just a stray bird and some teenagers throwing rocks, the building's secure. Oh, and get that bird out of the vents. Can't turn the detectors back on if a bird's still flying around inside. You have about fifteen minutes before the alarm system resets and the lasers turn back on. Understood?"

The security guard nodded briskly and scrambled out of the room, looking like he was taking orders from an army general. If Victor hadn't been so busy focusing on not getting caught in his schemes, he might've laughed.

"Here we go," he muttered to himself as he turned back to the computer.

He needed to reset the system, and doing so would turn off all the alarms. The system would need at least fifteen minutes to start up again, and that process would give him a small window to take all the research and the samples from the labs. In that precious time frame where all the alarms would be disabled, he needed to get Yuuri from the ground floor, get up to the labs, have a look around, get back to the server room, and then back to the ground floor. Of everything in the plan, _this_ would be the hard part, especially since Victor had no idea how long looking for the samples would take.

Taking a deep breath, Victor reset the system with the tap of another key.

On the clock.

With the flick of a wrist, he produced a large USB drive. Eddington had given it to him and told him just to stick it into the computer, open it up, and let it do its work. The code Eddington's programmer wrote would copy all of the stolen files back onto the disk, then erase the files thoroughly from the computer system. Moving swiftly, Victor followed Eddington's instructions and raced out the door.

The elevator dinged immediately, and, no longer needing a key card, Victor waited patiently as it brought him back to the ground floor.

 _Right on time,_ he thought as he spotted Yuuri hovering by the front door. Victor gestured for him to come in, one foot in the elevator. Not a single security guard in sight. At least Victor had done his part of the plan correctly. If he hadn't been so short on time, he might've even stopped to admire his work.

"We're on the clock," he told Yuuri as the chemist ran to Victor's side, breathless and confused.

"How did you do it?" he asked, eyes wide.

Victor couldn't help but smile as the elevator began to move. "I told you. I'm not a thief."

Yuuri looked at him, clearly puzzled.

"I'm a _good_ thief."


	3. Chapter Three: Greed & Foolishness

**Enjoy! I had a lot of fun writing this, so thank you to everyone who supported the first two chapters. I'm glad you guys are having just as much fun as I am. Word count: 4,332.**

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Chapter Three: Greed & Foolishness

Get Yuuri. Get back to the server room. Disconnect the USB after it finished doing its job. Head up to the labs. Search the labs.

All in fifteen minutes. Considering the circumstances, Victor would say they were doing splendidly in terms of time. They hadn't run into any security guards; Victor figured they would all be busy on the ground floor and perhaps they had just been lucky in dodging the patrols. Still, it took him and Yuuri the better part of the fifteen minutes to locate the agriculture section and find the samples.

Yuuri identified the samples with ease, and Victor swept the little vials up into his coat despite Yuuri's protests.

"Will they survive in my coat?" Victor asked.

"Yes, but they're more likely to break and—"

Victor waved him off. "We don't have time to wheel these out in a carriage. Come on."

Then it was back to the elevator and down to the server room. Victor practically ripped the USB from the computer, not bothering to eject it properly. Eddington had told him it would take up to eight minutes for the USB to finish doing its work, and if the data hadn't been copied and deleted already, that was his fault, not Victor's. At this point in the plan, Victor was more focused on saving his own hide and getting the hell out of dodge before the alarms came back on. Together, he and Yuuri sprinted back towards the elevator.

"Shit," he cursed as the watch on his wrist beeped for the last time. Ten seconds left. Quickly, he pulled Yuuri in the direction the staircase instead.

 _We can still get out of this if we get to the staircase,_ Victor thought wildly. _There aren't any security cameras in the stairwell or around the entrances because the doors all have a fingerprint pad. All we have to do is get through just one more checkpoint. One more checkpoint._

Then to Victor's horror, they reached the entrance to the stairwell just as the fingerprint pad came back to life. His stomach dropped as he watched the little lock's screen flicker with blue light while they were just mere meters away.

"No, no, no! Damn it!" Victor yelled. If only they had a few more seconds, they could've been out.

 _This cannot be happening,_ he thought, grappling with his options.

They could try to disarm the finger pad, but Victor doubted they could ever manage such a feat before a patrol caught them tampering with the security. They could go back the way they came, in full sight of the cameras. But Victor wouldn't be able to operate the elevator now, and he doubted he could find the security guard he met earlier even if he wanted to. Besides, he wasn't going to be able to explain why he was suddenly dragging a chemist in tow.

For the first time in his life, Victor was trapped. Truly and properly trapped on the eighth floor of the cursed building.

"I am truly, properly out of tricks," he told Yuuri quietly. "If any of the talents you mentioned earlier are useful, now would be the time."

Yuuri said nothing. Victor felt a surge of regret as he realized he was the one who had dragged Yuuri into this mess. If he hadn't been so eager for revenge, Eddington would never have picked Yuuri to go with Victor. If he had done a better job planning, they would be strolling away from Massive Dynamic by now. If he had hurried just a second quicker, ran a little faster, stretched a little farther, the building would be at their backs, a mere blight on the moon once again.

Suddenly, the crinkling of a cellophane bag caused a startled Victor to whirl around. Behind him, Yuuri was opening a plastic bag of—Victor looked closer, frowning— _Haribo Frogs?_

"Gummy frogs," Yuuri said, popping one into his mouth. As if that explained anything.

Now was _really_ not the time to be having a midnight snack, but before Victor could say anything else, Yuuri gently pushed him aside and inspected the fingerprint lock.

"Gummy frogs have the same elasticity and consistency as human skin, so it should be able to pass as a thumb if you apply the right pressure," he explained. "There's already an imprint of someone's finger on this lock, so if you transfer the pattern from the pad to the frog, we can unlock this door."

Victor simply stared.

"I underestimated you," he admitted softly, a little sheepish.

"Most people do," Yuuri said as he pulled out what looked to be eyeshadow and started gently dabbing at the pad with a brush full of fine black powder. Upon closer inspection, Victor saw the tinted resin sticking to the oil ridges of the last fingerprint. Carefully, Yuuri pressed the gummy frog against the fingerprint lock when he finished with the brush. Victor waited, breathless.

 _He knows a lot more than he lets on,_ he thought. _I could learn a lot from him._

A second later, the door to the stairwell clicked open.

"Like I said, I have other talents."

-::-

They ran from the building, laughing to themselves as their feet passed over the sidewalk.

 _We did it,_ Victor wanted to shout into the night sky. _We just broke into one of the highest security buildings in Detroit and made it out alive._

"Gummy frogs, huh?" he asked Yuuri as they came to a halt.

"Gummy frogs," he confirmed.

"You learn something new every day," Victor said with another laugh. He couldn't remember the last time he laughed so much or so hard. The past months had been merciless for him, utterly without mirth or companionship. Hell, there hadn't even been someone he could talk to, much less joke around with. And yet, just a few hours of breaking into a building with Yuuri had changed that.

Slowly, keeping his eyes on Yuuri's face, Victor extended his hand. Yuuri took it hesitantly.

"End of the line, huh?" Yuuri asked.

"Eddington gave me a place to meet to exchange the data and the samples after we got out," Victor replied. "But yeah, this is it. We did it. We made it out. And now we get this stuff where it belongs."

"I'm surprised to say that I'm sorry about this ending."

"Same here."

In one fluid motion, Victor drew Yuuri closer and pulled an arm around him. To his surprise, he felt Yuuri hugging him back a moment later. They stayed like that for a while, just the two of them together on a nearly-deserted sidewalk. A few drivers passed by and cast them confused looks, but even downtown Detroit at the early hours before dawn was nearly devoid of human life. No one to report two suspicious figures walking away from a would-be crime scene.

"We almost didn't make it out of there," Victor said when they broke apart.

"I know," Yuuri said, pulling out his phone.

"A commemorative photo?" Victor asked, puzzled.

"Just phoning for a taxi," Yuuri answered. "You said there was an address to meet, right? I can request a taxi under an alias so it doesn't get traced back to us."

To be honest, Victor hadn't even considered how they would get to where they needed to go from the building. He had been so fixated on breaking in, on getting the research, on getting back out. There were so many things to keep track of—so many components of the plan that could've gone wrong. Victor had been so tunnel-vision focused on his revenge that he bothered to include transportation away from Massive Dynamic in the planning.

They stood in easy silence as the cab pulled up to the curb, the driver disgruntled and confused at being called out at such hours. If Victor had any money on him, he would've given the driver a generous tip for operating at such times of the night. Nothing the hundred thousand dollars couldn't cover.

Together, they rode in silence, the cab humming gently beneath Victor's feet as trees flashed by his window. Within minutes, the city skyline faded behind them and was replaced by rolling country fields. The streets were mostly empty, without the usual traffic, and the ride was much faster than Victor anticipated. He glanced over at Yuuri as they climbed out of the cab, an unreadable expression on his face.

"What did Eddington offer you anyway?" Victor asked as they headed toward the warehouse Eddington said he would meet them at. It was a gloomy-looking building situated at the top of a hill, painted in a peeling coat of brown with bits of the wood underneath peeking through. If Victor hadn't known it was abandoned, he would've guessed it to be a storage building for a small hang glider from the size. According to Eddington, he had bought the run-down building located in the middle of nowhere with the hopes of reselling after a bit of polishing, but the market crash in 2008 put a screeching halt to his plans.

"What do you mean?" Yuuri replied.

"Eddington offered me a hundred thousand dollars for this job. What did he offer you?"

"Not _that_ much, that's for sure."

Victor shrugged and gave a slight chuckle. "You're too honest."

Yuuri frowned. "That's not a bad thing."

"Never sell something for less than what it's worth," Victor advised. "That heist we just pulled there was worth a lot, maybe even more than a hundred thousand."

Victor pulled the surprisingly-heavy warehouse door open and held it for Yuuri. Together, they walked towards the center of the empty building as the heavy steel doors slammed shut. Inside the dark interior, a couple old wooden crates lined the equally shabby walls, and a thick layer of dust had settled over the floor. Overhead, weak beams of light poured through broken windows along the upper sides of the building. With just one look, Victor had no trouble believing the warehouse hadn't been touched in nearly a decade.

 _Eddington could put this place to good use if he tried,_ Victor thought, spinning around to get a better look. _It would take a lot of work, but there's a lot of space here._

He frowned as his eyes landed on a stack of crates sitting by what Victor thought would be the west side of the warehouse. Something about them seemed off, but he couldn't quite put a finger on what it was that unsettled him. Perhaps if he was less sleep-deprived, he would've figured it out by now. Hesitantly, he took a few steps away from Yuuri and tried to get a better look. For some reason, the stack of three crates gave him a distinct feeling of unease.

 _What_ was _it about those crates?_

And then he heard it.

Coming from just a few meters behind him, Victor froze as he heard the unmistakable click of a gun.

-::-

The first sign he should've noticed came when he had entered the board's meeting room, almost a year ago. When he stepped into the offices, he had been almost blinded by the fluorescent bulbs above his head. The light was too bright, a white color that wasn't quite right—a kind of hospital, sickly light. Blackwell had been sitting alone in the meeting room, his fingers drumming on the glass surface from his position at the head of the table.

If Victor had known the monster Blackwell was at the time, he would've peeled the fingernails away from each of those drumming fingers, one by one. A small, cruel part of him had imagined how it would've felt to torture the business owner the same way he had tortured Victor.

"You're early," he said coldly as he saw Victor, who blinked as he tried to adjust to the light.

"It's good to be punctual."

 _How can anyone see in a room so sickeningly bright?_ Victor had wondered at the time. _It's as if they're trying to make it hard to see their faces._

"And so it is. Sit." Blackwell gestured to a chair next to his. Victor sat obediently.

"Terms of your contract," he said, nodding to a small stack of papers laid out before him.

Victor eyed the papers warily.

The contract had been hard to read, and Victor suspected it might've been done on purpose. His English was fairly decent, but as the meeting moved along, he found himself simply nodding along as Blackwell read the terms and conditions out loud. He could hold a conversation in English, read an English newspaper, but a formal contract with all its superfluous language, technical terms, and convoluted grammatical syntax left Victor's head spinning as he tried to interpret the sheets. Eventually, with his mind buzzing under the sickly white light, the words on the page simply turned into a mess of scribbles and centipede legs.

Perhaps that was why he was so easy to fool. Maybe Blackwell had known he wasn't going to be able to keep up his concentration until the very end, purposefully placing the most important bits at the bottom of the pile.

Or, maybe all of his employees have been screwed over one way or another by loopholes written into their contracts. Maybe they had all been as gullible as Victor.

"Blackwell Holdings will provide insurance to cover for the employee and any immediate family members, but the employee's claim is subject to investigation," Blackwell read out loud in a monotonous tone. "Investigations will be conducted in a timely and reasonable fashion by Blackwell Holdings. Should the employee find any fault with the insurance claim, coverage, or investigation, he or she may appeal to the company or the court. Employees may not receive coverage benefits after they have been dismissed, resigned, or have otherwise left their positions with Blackwell Holdings."

Victor only nodded along. "Fine, fine."

The terms had sounded reasonable enough without much scrutiny, and Victor had been too foolish to look deeper into the words. Too trusting and too foolish.

 _Good thing for Yuri to have medical insurance,_ was his only thought. _You can't do anything without medical insurance._

"Sign here to complete the agreement," Blackwell finished, holding a black pen forward.

Victor had studied it for a while, hesitating before he took the pen between his fingers. A part of Victor told himself not to sign, a warning from the depths of his intuition. And yet a greedy, foolish, more persistent part of him told him to go ahead and sign his name already. Greed and foolishness. Those had been Victor's downfall.

There were so many signs that the meeting was wrong, inexplicably so. The sickly, blinding white light that was too bright and hid Blackwell's face. The fact that Blackwell had not been present with any other board members, any company lawyers, or witnesses. The fact that he had called Victor up to the meeting room with him alone. The fact that Victor had not been offered a copy of the contract, and Blackwell didn't seem to plan on giving him one anytime soon. Even the way Blackwell seemed to never be at ease, restless and always fiddling with his thumbs or the pen as he read from the papers in front of them both.

Victor should've looked at all these signs and realized something was going to go wrong. The person he was now would've realized he was being swindled and double-crossed from the moment he sat down in the chair.

And yet, the Victor he was about a year ago had simply taken the pen and signed his life away in a flourish of ink.

-::-

"Turn around with your hands in the air," he heard Yuuri's shaky voice order. "No sudden movements."

Slowly, Victor raised his arms and turned to face the barrel of Yuuri's gun.

"Are you going to kill me, Yuuri?" he asked as serenely as he possibly could.

Yuuri didn't reply. Upon closer inspection, Victor saw his hands was shaking as they gripped the handle of his gun. In fact, his entire body seemed to be vibrating—nervous and shaky. If Victor hadn't known any better, he would've said Yuuri's body had been caught in the middle of an earthquake.

 _He hasn't held a gun before in his life,_ Victor realized with a jolt. _He hasn't killed anyone before. Hell, he hasn't even broken into a building before._

"You're not going to shoot me," he said. A dangerous bet, but Victor liked his odds.

"I have to," Yuuri replied, his voice trembling. "I have to do this."

"What does Eddington have on you?"

"That's not his name."

"What does he have on you?"

"It doesn't matter."

Victor took a step forward, and Yuuri recoiled, the barrel tilting sideways wildly. _"What does he have on you?"_

"Stay back."

"You're not going to shoot me," Victor repeated. "You're too honest, like I said. It's written all over your face that you won't shoot me anytime soon."

Victor took another step forward, and Yuuri inched back ever so slightly. Pressing his advantage, Victor continued. "Do you think you can really do it, Yuuri with two U's and an I? Do you think you can pull that trigger and watch me drop to the ground? If your aim isn't good and if I don't die instantly, I'll be lying there convulsing and spewing blood in every direction. Or my head might crack open on the floor, and you'll be there to watch bits of my skull join the dust on this floor. The blood wouldn't even be red, you know, since it would mix with all the dirt."

Yuuri's eyes widened, filled with a hundred different kinds fright.

 _Just what does Eddington or whatever his name is have on this guy?_ Victor wondered as he took his chances and lunged forward.

He watched as Yuuri scrambled backwards to avoid being tackled by Victor, watched as Yuuri's slender fingers closed on the trigger. Once, twice, three times.

 _Click. Click. Click._

Nothing happened.

Then Victor was wrenching the gun out of Yuuri's hand and flinging it across the dusty floor. With the twist of his sleeve, Victor withdrew the switchblade he hid in his overcoat and flicked the knife open. He wasn't thinking, just reacting on instinct. Without hesitation, he propelled Yuuri into the dusty ground with a snarl, pinning him down by the neck with one hand and pressing the blade against the chemist's throat with the other.

"Who do you work for?" Victor demanded. "Who are you?"

"Yuuri," the man underneath him choked out, struggling under Victor's weight. "Yuuri Katsuki. Two U's and an I."

Victor pressed the blade a bit deeper, letting its cold sting sink into Yuuri's neck. Immediately, Yuuri turned deathly pale and went still as the grave.

"Who do you work for?"

"No one."

With a quick slash, Victor drew blood. Yuuri's yelped as tiny beads of red formed at the shallow cut just below the throat.

"I can tell when you're lying," Victor growled. "I told you, didn't I? You have an honest face."

"Eddington," Yuuri stammered. Then before Victor could ask another question—or before Victor slit his throat—he stumbled forward. "My family owns a hot springs bath house back in Japan, and we took a loan from the man you call Eddington to pay for my college and to keep the bath house open. He called in our loan a few days ago, said we were gonna lose the house and everything if we didn't pay him back. Unless I did this. Unless I killed you."

Yuuri let out a humiliating sound, something between a choked sob and a panicked wail.

"I had no choice," he cried, tears starting to form in his eyes. "I had no choice."

Victor looked deep into Yuuri's round, honest eyes. They were watery and pained and frightened and fifty different kinds of panicked, but they didn't hold any trace of deception. Yuuri's eyes were honest— _too honest—_ and slowly, Victor came to the conclusion the chemist was telling the truth. Cautiously, he released his iron grip on Yuuri's neck and removed the blade from his throat. Yuuri let out a series of hacking coughs, rolling over and clutching at his neck.

 _Eddington,_ Victor thought, his mind reeling. _Eddington double-crossed me. It all feels so familiar, being double-crossed again and again._

Why hadn't he learned? How did Eddington draw him in again the same way Blackwell had—with false promises of security and fortune, false promises of whatever Victor needed most desperately at the time? With a jolt, Victor realized Eddington had fooled him almost _exactly_ the same way Blackwell had. There had been a contract, yes. An agreement and a handshake. An agreement with no one to bear witness except a tired, easily-bribed bartender. An agreement held with nothing more than the honor of Eddington's words.

Which apparently was not worth much at all.

No one would testify on Victor's behalf, no one would believe that Eddington had hired Victor to break into Massive Dynamic. When he died, his obituary would show up in the papers and not a soul would care. Not a soul would know what Eddington had done, what he had asked Victor to do.

Running a gloved hand through his hair, Victor ran through his options. He tried his best to analyze his situation, but the only thing coming to mind was memory of dull roaring in his ears, the stench of smoke and taste ash, the burning sensation grating against the inside of his lungs, and the feeling of weightlessness.

 _It's happening again. It's happening all over again._

"How did you get rid of the bullets?" Yuuri asked cautiously, getting off the ground.

It was obvious the chemist didn't have any plans to make another attempt on Victor's life any time soon. His voice sounded raspy, like metal grated over stone, but it brought Victor out of his stupor.

"You have an honest face," Victor replied for the umpteenth time that day. "And I can pick pockets."

At the very least, he learned _that_ much from the past year. This time, Victor took in the signs, all the signs. The way Yuuri's coat pocket sagged, the outline of a handgun made clear after he withdrew the bag of gummy frogs. The way Yuuri wouldn't meet his eyes. The way he kept reaching into his coat pocket as if to check on a phone only to pause halfway, as if he didn't want Victor to know what he was hiding but still wanted to check if something important was still there. Fearing the worst, Victor read the signs and disarmed the gun while they had hugged after leaving Massive Dynamic. He had hoped Yuuri only carried the gun as a last resort, not because he was hiding an insidious scheme of his own, but now he knew Yuuri had been doing a lot more than just scheming.

Turning around, Victor's eyes searched the dusty ground for the empty gun. It had left a clear trail in the thick layer of dust after Victor flung it away.

 _The dust,_ he realized with a jolt. _Of all things, it was the_ dust _._

Victor whirled, turning to the crates on the west side that had prickled at the edges of his attention when they first entered. He knew exactly what about those crates made him feel uneasy now.

 _Everything on here is covered in a layer of dust,_ he thought _. Except that stack of crates right there. They match the other crates well enough, but there isn't a speck of dust on them. They haven't been in the warehouse until recently. Someone purposefully_ put _them there not too long ago, then covered their tracks._

"We need to get out of here," he told Yuuri, ushering him towards the exit. "We need to get out of here _now."_

If this was anything like last time and if Eddington's thought process was _anything_ like Blackwell's, Victor knew how their little heist would end. They wouldn't leave any survivors. No witnesses. No one to testify against them. Not Victor with his pockets full of research or Yuuri who had helped him steal them. Yuuri's job hadn't been to kill Victor at all. One look at him and Eddington would've known he didn't have the spine, even with his family's bath house on the line. His job was solely to help Victor find the right samples and then to die in that abandoned warehouse alongside his silver-haired partner in crime.

Victor ripped open the warehouse door and shoved Yuuri through it. The chemist opened his mouth to ask a question, but Victor pushed him ahead, sprinting away from the godforsaken building as fast as his legs could possibly carry him.

"Make a run for the road!" he roared in Yuuri's general direction.

The words had barely left Victor's mouth when the building behind him burst into flames.


	4. Chapter Four: Passing Shadow

**Is it Mila Babicheva or Milla Babicheva or Mila Bavicheva or Milla Bavicheva? Will we ever know? Word count: 5,155.**

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Chapter Four: Passing Shadow

They spent the car ride back to the city in stony silence. Once, Yuuri moved to speak, but Victor silenced him with an icy glare. They couldn't risk the taxi driver hearing anything about what had happened or what they were planning to do next. Though Yuuri and Victor had used aliases and paid their driver a _more than generous_ sum for his discretion, two men covered in soot and ash no more than a couple miles away from a flaming warehouse was bound to attract unwanted attention sooner or later.

Not to mention Victor was very much not in the mood for conversing with someone who had just tried to kill him.

Although to be honest, he wasn't really taking the attempt on his life to heart. Of all the people who had tried to kill him in just the past year, Victor figured Yuuri's intentions were undoubtedly the purest. Blackmailed into murder. Providing for his family and whatnot. Surviving in the world.

At the end of the day, perhaps Yuuri was just like him—just trying to survive.

He almost had to laugh at that.

When had his standards dropped so _low?_

Either way, they were in this mess together now. Victor could either make peace with the fact that Yuuri had been blackmailed to kill him or he could make both their lives a thousandfold harder by harboring a grudge. They both had targets on their back now. Targets placed there by the same people. They could survive together or not at all.

Victor only broke the silence to tell the taxi driver where to pull up on the curb. He couldn't risk going back to his dingy little apartment or wherever Yuuri lived, and there was only one place left in Detroit where he could still go to. Only one place where no one would think to look.

"It's a couple blocks from here," Victor told Yuuri as they got out of the car.

"Your safehouse?" Yuuri asked.

"Something like that."

Victor felt a surge of relief that the sun was just starting to rise. If they walked quickly, they could avoid being seen. Two men covered from head to toe in soot were too conspicuous in broad daylight, even in a city as wild as Detroit. If his judgement was any good, news of the exploding warehouse would be hitting the headlines in less than an hour. Even though Victor knew Eddington—or whatever his name was—most likely assumed they were dead, there was always a chance he would hear of their escape. And the responsible party behind the explosion would not risk leaving any survivors.

"Is your phone off?" he asked over his shoulder as they hurried down the street.

Yuuri only nodded.

"Good. We can't have anyone tracking us. For all Eddington knows, we're dead. Your phone's GPS is not going to be the thing that tells him otherwise."

Victor hesitated.

"You're a dead man, Yuuri with two U's and an I. Your family members are going to think you died, your friends are going to think you died, your acquaintances, your co-workers. But you can't risk contacting any one of them. Not for anything. Not even if it hurts."

It was the truth—a cold and harsh reality. The risk of them contacting any old friends for refuge was too great.

 _That's why I'm not going to any old friend,_ Victor thought as they came to a stop in front of a large apartment building. Six stories of tidy brick walls, decently far away from the worst of the traffic jams, and set with strong foundations. Overhead, little flowerpots adorned the windowsills while rooms on highest floor were decorated with small balconies overlooking the street. If Victor had a choice, he would certainly choose to live on the top floor. The balcony gave an easy escape route and a nice view of the city from all directions.

 _She might be a sort-of friend, but she's not going to like this._

"Top floor," Victor said to Yuuri as he slid the lockpicks out from his sleeves and set them to work on the front door. It clicked open under his touch a few seconds later, and Victor held it as Yuuri entered. "Don't piss her off."

"Her?"

"Friend," Victor answered as they stepped into the elevator. It whirred as they rode up to the top floor, gears spinning. "Well, I say friend."

"Girlfriend?"

Victor let out a short bark of laughter. _"Hell,_ no. Not interested and she would kill me in my sleep."

"What's her name?"

The elevator came to a jerky stop, and Victor lead the way down the hall. The top floor of the apartment building had four rooms, but he knew it was occupied by only one person who paid for all four. Victor remembered her saying that the landlord thought she was an aspiring artist who needed the space for paintings, studios, other hipster-in-Detroit-trying-to-discover-self needs. He had been easy enough to fool with a collection of stolen paintings, and he didn't bother her as long as she paid her monthly rent.

"Mila Babicheva," Victor answered grimly, pausing in front of the last door on the hall.

Taking a deep breath, he rapped his knuckles on the door.

A moment later, muffled footsteps and a series of loud complaints came from the other side. The door jerked open an inch, and a bob of flaming red hair peered around the edge. He caught a brief glimpse of Mila's blue eyes before the door was slammed in his face.

"Wha—" Yuuri started to ask, but Victor shushed him with a finger to his lips.

The sound of a chain lock opening reached their ears, and then the door swung open in full, revealing a very disgruntled woman standing in a messy apartment. The woman looked like she was in her late twenties, a mop of mousy red hair and spray of freckles, but Victor suspected she was much older than she looked. He never bothered to ask her about her age, and he doubted she would tell him even if he did ask.

"It's _you,"_ she said with an accusatory finger. The lithe figure turned her back to him and started to make her way to the kitchen. "Leave your shoes at the door."

The floor of the apartment was riotous mess, cluttered with miscellaneous articles of clothing, lockpicks, wigs, makeup kits, and other accessories he didn't even know existed. Slowly, Victor kicked off his shoes and picked his way through the minefield of Mila's belongings, trying to follow her into the kitchen without stepping on anything. With a jolt, he remembered that Mila didn't own any furniture—why bother owning anything that couldn't be sold for more than a couple thousand dollars?

"Were you expecting it to be someone else?" Victor asked as he carefully stepped over a stray wig, gesturing for Yuuri to follow. His bare feet looked out of place against Mila's hardwood floor.

"The hockey player," she grumbled.

"The hockey player knows you're here?"

 _"The hockey player_ doesn't even know who I am." Mila gave him a smug look as she opened a cupboard, emerging a second later with three bottles of vodka. "He doesn't know where to begin to look for me, but honestly, I don't know why he's got his pants in a twist in the first place."

"Mila, sweetie, you stole _the Stanley Cup_ from him."

"You're changing the subject."

She held out one of the three bottles, and Victor eyed the offering warily. It wasn't that he didn't trust the unopened bottle, but he wasn't completely sure why Mila was giving him an entire seven hundred and fifty milliliters of it.

"Don't have cups, remember?" she reminded him, waving the bottle in his face. "They're impractical. Not worth a dime these days."

She handed the second bottle to Yuuri, who accepted it with a confused look and a muttered thanks. He had taken in their whole exchange without a word, just a confused expression and a frown as he observed the room. Victor didn't blame him for the confusion—the chemist had been dropped in the middle of the messy apartment without any explanation, and Mila was definitely among the most baffling people living in Detroit.

The petite woman eyed him warily, then plopped herself down in the middle of her floor among the clutter. She gave the bottle cap a little twist before turning her sights to Victor. Over the past few months, he found himself not exactly _trusting_ her; he had no doubt she would sell him out to the nearest police officer out of necessity if she was backed into a corner. But he had learned a lot from her through their jobs together, had put his life in her hands more than a handful of times and same vice versa. More importantly, he trusted her enough to keep his secrets. They had enough dirt on each other and had worked together enough to mutually destroy the other, and so he was absolutely certain Mila would _not_ carelessly run her mouth about him or Yuuri to any random person on the street.

"You picking up strays now?" she asked, nodding in Yuuri's direction.

"Mila, meet Yuuri," Victor introduced. "Two U's and an I. Yuuri, meet Mila Babicheva."

Yuuri extended his hand as if to offer her a handshake but then caught sight of the soot clinging to his skin. He retracted the hand, embarrassed.

"Sorry," he said shyly. "I would shake your hand, but we're all covered in dirt."

"Speaking of which, do you mind if we get cleaned up?"

Mila's nostrils flared as she squared her thin shoulders. "What do you think this place is, a homeless shelter?"

Victor gave her a knowing look, and she sighed in mock resignation.

"You know where the bathroom is, and I'll show your new friend here to the one in the other room." With a flick of her wrist, Mila tossed him a jingling film canister, half full of quarters. "There's a laundry machine there too."

"Thank you, dear," Victor told her with a smile and a bow.

She jabbed another accusatory finger in his direction and took a swig from the bottle. "Don't think you don't owe me an explanation, Nikiforov."

"I'll give you one as soon as I figure it out myself," he called over his shoulder.

-::-

They had met in the most unconventional way possible.

"Victor Nikiforov," the petite woman on the other side of the cash register had called. To be honest, Victor hadn't really even looked at her until she said his name—another average barista in a cheap little coffee shop with all long brown hair and even longer legs. The little name tag on her apron read "Hannah" in cursive letters.

"Yes?" he asked rather stupidly as he accepted his coffee.

She slid a small piece of paper across the counter towards him. "My number."

Before Victor could give the paper back, she had moved on to the next customer, leaving him there with just a steaming cup of hot coffee and a slip of paper. At the time, Victor had simply shaken his head and moved on. He slipped the piece of paper into the garbage can on his way out—no interest nor care if the barista saw him throwing it away.

 _Why couldn't people take the hint?_ he had asked himself bitterly.

After that, he didn't think about her for the rest of the day. Victor had a job to do; he had debts to pay, money to earn, the programming of another set of cameras he would see to for a private art gallery, an empty little apartment to return to when the day was over. That was his life in a nutshell, lonely and monotonous. He didn't have time for baristas batting their eyelashes at him despite his evident disinterest.

It was when he was making his way home when she reappeared. He had been looking at the ground as he walked down the street, and then he heard the familiar voice, calling his name from a few meters ahead.

"Victor Nikiforov," she said simply, arms crossed.

He had looked up, startled. It took him a while before he recognized her as the barista.

"Not interested," he said simply, trying to shove his way past her.

But she was much, _much_ stronger than she looked and had planted herself firmly in his path. "It's rude to leave a girl hanging, you know."

"Like I said, _not interested."_

She had snorted at that, then sighed in exasperation.

"Interested in helping a girl steal some paintings then?"

Victor stopped dead in his tracks. "What?"

"You heard me."

He hadn't known that she was _the_ Mila Babicheva was at the time, and he suspected that she expected him to have read her name on the piece of paper she gave him earlier that day. In truth, he hadn't even researched her in depths, only heard her name thrown out from time to time between jobs.

Mila Babicheva—the most infamous thief in Detroit. One of his recent employers had told him specifically "to make sure the likes of Mila Babicheva couldn't get in." Victor hadn't taken the comment to heart. He simply designed the security system the way he would do in any other situation. Mila Babicheva or not, his job was to make sure no one got in, and that was exactly what he did. His employer had no complaints, and as long as Victor got his paycheck at the end of the day, he did not have any either. The name eventually moved to the back of his mind, the last of his priorities, but it popped up again from time to time, like a passing shadow he couldn't get rid of.

But if Mila Babicheva was a shadow, she certainly made a very lively one, studying Victor with curiously large green eyes.

"I'm Mila, by the way, in case you didn't read the paper," she introduced, taking a step forward. She didn't offer him a hand, and he wasn't very interested in shaking with her either way. "You designed the security system to the new gallery, yes? You know the layout?"

Then it clicked inside Victor's mind. The name and where he heard it from. With a jolt, he realized _this_ was the thief everyone hired him to keep out. The petite woman with a tidy frame like a figure skater's and a posture as sharp as a knife. She looked different from what he expected—less sneaky, more bold, and a lot more lively than anyone should've been in this godforsaken city.

"I'm guessing you want me to help you?" he asked coldly. He had half a mind to try to have her arrested, but an even larger part of him didn't care.

 _This city's going to hell anyway,_ he had thought. _Might as well let her have fun before it happens._

"Exactly!" she exclaimed cheerfully, clasping her hands together. "Glad we're on the same page."

"I'm not going to do it," Victor sighed as he shoved past her again. This time, she let him through, and he hurried onwards in a brisk walk. A second later, he realized she had ran after him, hot on his heels.

"Why not?" Mila called.

"Because if _you_ break into _my_ security system, no one will want to hire me to design their stuff ever again," he explained. "My reputation's ruined, people will know my work is _not_ fool-proof, and no one will ever think about hiring me. They'll move onto the next in line."

"Who said I would be breaking in?" Mila demanded.

"How else do you plan to take whatever it is you're planning to steal?"

She shrugged. "You know, Nikiforov, most thieves find entrances."

"And you're not a thief?" he shot back with a harsh laugh.

"No," Mila replied haughtily, "I'm a _good_ thief. I _make_ entrances."

In a quick burst of speed, she shoved past him again and placed herself squarely in his path, hands on her hips.

"What if I told you I'm good at disguising myself? No one will ever know it's a thief who whisked away their precious painting, and if they don't know it's a thief, if they think it's an inside job, then they won't blame you." Mila shook her head in frustration, brown hair fluttering in the wind. "I'll even pay you part of money. You need it, don't you?"

"Still not worth the risk," he said after a slight hesitation.

 _"Dvum smertyam ne byvat, odnoy ne minovat,"_ she had chided him. Two deaths will not happen, but one is inevitable—a Russian proverb. It is worthwhile to take a risk.

Victor simply smiled sadly and left her standing in the wind, in the middle of an empty sidewalk.

Eventually, he caved in. In part because he needed the money, more badly than Mila could ever know. It was also in part due to her persistence. It was as if she knew he would eventually cave, that he had wanted to accept her request from the very beginning. The rumors about the man who owned the gallery were common knowledge—how he blackmailed sellers into lowering their prices, cheated families of their heirlooms from under their noses, used every dirty tactic under the sun to complete his prized collection of mismatched, priceless paintings. The rumors that Victor was out of options and working for a man who disgusted him must have reached Mila, and it was as if she had caught onto the end of a thread and refused to let go.

She must've followed him back to his apartment that night without him knowing, then started to wait outside the building every morning. They would walk into the city together, silently, Mila always a few paces behind Victor.

Victor knew she would leave him alone if he really asked. She kept a respectable distance away from him, and he knew her insistence was not because she had any intention to disturb him or stalk his daily habits. The challenge in her eyes were clear.

Would he do what was right by the law or would he do what was right by himself?

And eventually, a week before the gallery was slated to open, he had looked at her in her green eyes. They were dull in the rainy weather, but they still burned fiercely with a question that demanded his response.

"I'll help you," he answered.

-::-

"Now, you owe me an explanation," Mila demanded, back in the present. She was sprawled on her floor with the same bottle of vodka. "I was sleeping before you barged in here, you know?"

Her wig and colored contacts were gone now, leaving only her natural appearance—no brown hair, no green eyes, just the same tidy frame and sharp posture.

Victor ran her towel through his hair again. It was _definitely_ receding, and Victor could feel it growing thinner and thinner with every passing second. He supposed the recent events had no mercy on his shrinking sheaf of silver.

"Ran into a job, ran into some trouble," he explained simply.

She glared at him.

"Fine then," he sighed, turning his attention to Yuuri. "Why not let Yuuri explain what happened?"

The chemist visibly cringed, and Victor felt a small flash of regret. Still, he kept his eyes trained on Yuuri as he explained. Droplets of water from the recent shower stuck to his skin, and bits of his hair lay slick against his forehead. For some reason, Victor felt an irrational urge to brush the hairs away. He shook away the urge, telling himself to concentrate.

"A man who called himself Eddington came to me," Yuuri explained hesitantly. He looked wary, and his hand absentmindedly felt the raw tissue around his throat. Victor couldn't blame him for being twitchy about the subject. "He called in my family's loan. Told me he could let us off if I did two things for him. One, if I helped a man named Victor Nikiforov steal some research from Massive Dynamic."

Mila drew a sharp intake of breath, her eyes widening. "You two _broke into_ Massive Dynamic?"

Yuuri nodded in confirmation.

"I couldn't even get in there if I tried," she commented with grudging admiration. "It's almost impossible."

"I think you _meant_ to say impressive," Victor corrected. She simply waved him off.

"The other thing I had to do was to kill Victor Nikiforov after it was done and get the research to Eddington. He said Victor couldn't be trusted to deliver the research himself—he was a thief and wouldn't be returning it without a price. Something like a hundred thousand."

"Which is exactly what he offered to pay me when we struck _our_ deal," Victor interrupted bitterly.

Mila cast Victor a disappointed look.

 _"Only_ a hundred thousand?" she asked.

He shrugged. "We all make bad decisions."

"Anyway," Yuuri continued, his eyes downcast, shame prickling his features, "Eddington told me about the project and showed me pictures of the samples beforehand. I've never worked for that other company before in my life—Defense Green or something—but I knew what they looked like. He said that I had to act as the double agent. I was to help Victor Nikiforov get into the building, get the research, and get back out. I was to go along with his plans, act like I was hired for the same purpose. I was only supposed to kill him in the end."

"Didn't work, did it?" Victor asked matter-of-factly. Yuuri turned pink at his words.

With a sigh, Victor turned to Mila and told her his side—how Eddington confronted him in a bar, how he had been hired to steal back research for a small company, how they were supposed to meet at the warehouse before it burst into flames. He went over every painful detail by painful detail, trying to pinpoint what he could've done to prevent the mess he was in. Asked for the money upfront? Been less trusting? Visited the company Eddington supposedly owned himself?

"Eddington's name was listed on the website of the company he claimed to be a part of, so I didn't question it further," Victor admitted. "But from what Yuuri says, he seems to be a banker."

"He is," Yuuri confirmed. "He was a representative of the bank who called in our loan. And he showed us his credentials with the bank."

"Forged?" Mila suggested.

"Don't know," Victor admitted. He stood up and began pacing the room—if you could call tiptoeing between Mila's clutter pacing—and ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. "Eddington could be an alias he used to create two identities, the company owner and the banker. Or, he could have picked the name off of the agricultural company's website and used it to create the banker's identity. Or he could actually be the company owner and pretended to be the banker with fake credentials. Hell, this guy could be two different people working together for all we know."

He paused.

"What I want to know is why he would blow up his own research. The same research that he supposedly wanted."

"Maybe the bombs were rigged to dispose of your body more easily," Yuuri suggested timidly. He looked more like a frightened mouse than anything else.

Victor and Mila laughed simultaneously.

"Yuuri, you're too honest," Mila said in between giggles. "Even someone on the street could look at your face and see you wouldn't kill a soul. Whoever this man is, he hired you knowing you wouldn't kill Victor here. Your job was to find the samples and keep Victor in the warehouse long enough for the bombs to blow."

Yuuri seemed to think that over.

"So then why would he get rid of what he hired us to steal? He _wanted_ that research."

"Unless he didn't want it," Victor interrupted, eyes widening in realization.

 _Stem rust,_ he thought. _That's what he said the research was for. But what_ kind _of stem rust?_

"What's the research for?" he asked Yuuri. "You said Eddington or whatever his name is told you about it."

"A strain of wheat that can withstand the newest outbreak of stem rust," Yuuri explained. "I haven't seen the details myself, but I was familiar with the project, even before Eddington showed me what the samples looked like. Last year, there was an outbreak of a new and highly contagious pathogen in Sicily—TTTTF rust in North American nomenclature—and it's been spreading through the Mediterranean region. Crop yields were devastated."

"But it hasn't hit American soil yet, has it?" Victor asked, understanding dawning on him.

Yuuri shook his head.

"So if it were to hit American crops this season," Victor continued slowly, "and if Massive Dynamic—a company owned by Blackwell, no less—is the only company that _has_ a wheat strain that would survive, all the other agriculture companies would be decimated."

"They would be rich," Mila finished. "Filthy rich. Monopolizing the biggest food source in the United States."

Victor hadn't wanted to consider the possibility of Eddington being affiliated with Blackwell, but as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, it looked more and more likely. The job Eddington hired him for could only benefit one person, could only have been orchestrated by one person. Someone who had used the same dirty tactics on him twice and had succeeded twice.

"But wouldn't the federal government naturally get suspicious?" Yuuri asked hesitantly.

"That's why they needed someone to steal it," Victor concluded, finishing the last piece of the puzzle. "If someone stole valuable research and left no trace of this wheat strain ever existing on their databases, it would look like Massive Dynamic or whatever other company owns the wheat had their crops survive on sheer luck and good prior planning. There's no smoking gun for the police to indicate they were the ones who released the pathogen, no leads to follow if they even _conduct_ an investigation. Nothing to indicate they would have reason to start the outbreak, no evidence trail to follow back to the company."

 _Or to Blackwell,_ he thought darkly.

"Shit," Mila whispered, her face pale. "You guys are in some deep shit. If they find out you're still alive, you're done. Finished."

"Dead," Victor added helpfully.

"I'm aiding and abetting two dead men," she grumbled. "I hate to say this, Vitya, but you need to get out of this city. You and Yuuri both."

Victor whirled to face her, sitting cross-legged underneath the window. Above her head, the beautiful red and orange sunrise spilled through the window. It illuminated Mila's hair, flames of red curling around her freckled face. Far, far in the distance, Victor saw the outline of Detroit against the rising sun, its dips and rises, its sharp edges and skyscrapers. If he strained his eyes, perhaps he could make out Massive Dynamic in the distance.

 _The city is just coming to life,_ he thought. _How many of these people would starve if Massive Dynamic unleashed its terror? How many would lose their jobs? How many children would die under their watchful eyes?_

The sensible, self-preserving thing to do would be to just leave the city. Put the Detroit skyline under the rising sun in his rearview mirror and drive away. Hadn't he always said the city was going to hell sooner or later? Why should it matter if it was more sooner than later? To hell with all the people starting to mill onto the sidewalks on their way to work. He could see them through Mila's window, moving like ants six stories below.

But then his thoughts drifted to the memory of Mila's eyes, burning with the unasked question. Would he do what was right by the law or would he do what was right by himself? Would he simply _let_ a company profit off of a famine they started? He thought of her chiding him with ancient Russian proverbs on their first meeting.

 _Two deaths will not happen, but one is inevitable._

What came out of Victor's mouth next surprised him.

"I'm staying here," he told Mila. Then he turned to Yuuri. "Someone has to make sure Blackwell pays. Someone has to stop his plans or die trying, and I might be the only one who can."

"And who's going to help you?" Mila asked. She didn't angry or surprised or frustrated—more like the passing shadow she had been the first time they met. Detached and curious about what he would do next. "In case you haven't noticed, you're a bit short on manpower here. You're a disgraced security consultant, and the people you're gunning for know your face. Yuuri here is a chemist who never asked for any of this, and they know his face too. And I'm just another dime a dozen thief."

"A _good_ thief," Victor corrected. "Besides, there are bound to be people with talents we need in this city. People who have been screwed over by Blackwell. People who're willing to help out."

Mila only sighed, but Yuuri nodded in agreement.

"Like you said, I'm dead. I can't go back to my old life, not without the wrong people knowing." Yuuri took a deep breath, then looked Victor straight in the eye for what was most likely the first time since they met. His eyes burned with newfound determination and purpose. "Someone needs to stop the outbreak, and I can't go back to my old life until the people behind this are discredited."

"You sure about this?" Mila asked, tilting her head. "I'm not leaving everything I've built here, so I guess I'm stuck in this godforsaken city until hell burns over. And Victor somehow has a newfound sense of justice or something, so I might as well help him since I owe him one. But we don't have much to go home to, no family like the one you've got."

"I can't exactly go back to them without putting them at risk," Yuuri replied with a shrug.

"And what if you die?"

Yuuri hesitated. Victor watched him carefully, anticipating his response. He didn't know why, but a small part of him wanted Yuuri to stay, to help him in this impossible venture. After a while, the chemist shrugged.

"Well, you said it yourself," he said. "You're aiding and abetting dead men."


	5. Chapter Five: The Fiddle Game

**Enjoy the update! Sorry about the delay. More excitement follows in the next chapter, I promise. Word count: 4,943.**

* * *

Chapter Five: The Fiddle Game

Victor's body was not obeying him.

He had been awake and on edge for almost fifty hours. First it was mentally going over the plans to break into Massive Dynamic, over and over again. Then it was the actual breaking in part. After that, it was straight to the warehouse that burst into flames, thankfully not with Victor inside it. And now he was lying on the uncomfortable hardwood floor of one of Mila's spare apartments. She didn't sleep on mattresses, just the wooden floor the apartment came with.

"It's not good for your posture," she had told him when he asked why she refused to sleep on anything soft. "And mattresses aren't worth what they cost anyway."

It made sense back then. Although Mila was the one who taught him how to make his own entrances, she was also the one who taught him the value of knowing where all the entry and exit points were anyway. You never knew when you needed to make a quick getaway. And for Mila, who spent a truly disproportionate amount of her life crawling in and out of air vents and vaulting over laser beams, maintaining her lithe frame and her knife-edge posture was of utmost importance.

Still, Victor _really_ wished Mila had mattresses. Or even a rug.

He wanted to stay awake for a bit longer, his back pressed up against a wall and pretending to sleep with one eye open to keep a watch on Yuuri. Mila insisted they sleep during the day and lay low. Admittedly, he had been pleasantly surprised by the chemist's declaration to stay in Detroit and help, but given the recent events, Victor still wanted to make sure Yuuri had no intentions of double-crossing him again.

To be honest, a part of him was inexplicably fascinated by the chemist—the way his chest rose and fell as he breathed, the way his eyebrows furrowed and the way his face turned red whenever he lied.

 _What kind of a life did Yuuri have if he never even had to lie?_ Victor thought to himself with a mixture of jealousy and wonder.

The idea of a life without having to lie to survive was absolutely foreign to him, a life he might've wanted at one point but couldn't have.

But eventually, Victor's body simply refused to obey him, pushed beyond the brink of exhaustion. Slowly, his eyes closed, and no matter how hard he tried, he could not open them.

-::-

"Did you manage to get away?" he whispered into his microphone. It had been a week since he had agreed to help Mila steal a Monet from the art gallery, a week of relentless planning and drilling each other on the small details. Now, their schemes were finally put into play.

Victor felt ridiculously stupid to be talking to himself in an empty car parked across the street, but there was no other way he could get a clear view of the art gallery's exterior without being in public, so he had to settle for communicating with Mila via wireless earbuds with built-in microphones. He could hear her voice on the other end, mixed with a bit of chatter and background noise.

"Not yet," he heard her whisper back. "It'll be a while."

The job had been simple, as simple as it could be without narrowing their window for success. They would have to rely on improvisation with the lack of safeguards—Victor thought it was best not to have too many. It was the law of systems. The more safeguards you built in your plan, the higher the chance that one of the safeguards would malfunction and ruin the job entirely. More room for error, more chances of making mistakes, and as much as Victor was at a moral conflict about the whole thing, he would not have liked to be caught stealing the new gallery's prized Monet painting.

Mila would enter the gallery under the pretense of just another visitor, there to admire the work. She would slip from the crowds after the visitors began to disperse, wait for Victor's cues to navigate the basement where he had hidden a gallery attendant's uniform among other things. He hoped it wouldn't be too big on Mila, but no matter how many lab coats he'd sifted through in the museum's closets, none of them matched her perfectly.

From there, Mila would wait in the vents until the gallery closed. She would make a quick snatch of the painting she wanted when no one was looking, replace it with a fake, then leave through the front door by pulling a fire alarm while dressed as just another attendant. Simple.

No one cared about the visitors when they were entering, and no one cared about the attendants when they were leaving, especially during a fire. As long as they didn't encounter any unanticipated problems, the plan would be executed flawlessly.

"Okay," she whispered into Victor's earbud. "I managed to get to the staircase without any of the guards noticing. Am I clear to go?"

Victor checked his watch. He knew the layout and schematics of the art gallery like the back of his hand, and one look at the time told him the familiar dome analog cameras were still pointed away from the stairwell entrance. It wouldn't be another minute before they rotated.

"All clear," he told Mila. "Head down the stairs and—"

"To the left of the landing there's a ventilation shaft," she finished. "Right. We've been over this."

"Just making sure."

"Are you _positive_ I have to crawl through this?" Mila hissed.

Victor heard her hurried footsteps echoing through the empty stairwell. If his predictions were accurate, most of the gallery attendants would be at home, away from all the guests. It was bad for attracting business if curators in lab coats started mingling with the high-profile visitors two stories above. They would come back once the showing was finished to do their nightly duties, and no one would take a second glance at what would seem like a new employee early to the shift.

"I could just walk towards the place you want me to go to."

"Can't avoid the cameras," Victor countered. "Like you said, we've been over this."

Mila grumbled something about not even wanting to avoid the cameras. While Victor knew most wouldn't recognize her with all the accessories she'd heaped onto herself, it was still best to stay out of sight of the basement cameras. Facial recognition software was a force perhaps even Mila's skills couldn't overcome.

He heard the shifting of a duffle bag—one that he planted inside the vent just the other day for Mila to find. Her supplies would be waiting for her inside. Makeup remover, practical clothing, whatever else she needed to transform from a rich guest to a gallery lab assistant.

Victor heard her humming softly to herself over the earpiece.

"Are you really _this_ thrilled at the chance of being arrested?"

"No, I'm thrilled at the chance of stealing a painting. I'm a collector of sorts myself, you know."

Victor grumbled to himself as she continued to hum. Less than a minute later, he heard the duffle bag shift, the grate closing with a loud clang, and Mila grunting as she started to move down the vent.

"You're on the clock, Babicheva," he told her.

He waited with anticipation as she dragged herself along the vent, sneezing and coughing occasionally.

"First two turns are lefts, then it's a right and a straight crawl from there," Mila muttered to herself. Although Victor knew she couldn't see him, he nodded.

They had ironed out every edge of this plan. Every turn in the vents had been put to memory. Every patrol. Every camera rotation. Victor hadn't known what was considered too much planning, what was considered too little. But Mila had told him not to worry too much; with all their planning, it was highly unlikely something was going to go wrong in the middle of the job.

He told himself that over and over again. Mila was the expert, she knew what she was doing, and it was in his best interest to go along with her.

Which was precisely why his heart skipped two beats when he heard the shrill sound of the gallery alarm, followed by Mila's cursing on the other end.

"What the hell happened?" Victor demanded, immediately on edge. His fingers jumped to the keys in the ignition, ready to bring the car to life.

"How the hell should I know?" Mila shot back. "You designed this place."

The sounds of her grunting and moving along the ventilation shaft quickened, echoing through the metal tunnel.

"You're in a _vent_. You shouldn't have tripped any alarms because there aren't any _in the vents_. I checked all the cameras this morning so we couldn't be caught. We made sure of that when we planned this damn thing out."

Victor's mind raced. Every system he'd built had been like a puzzle. Where to put the defense, where to put the offense. It was like a game of chess—when to sacrifice the knight to give the queen the advantage. But he never had to play against himself. He closed his eyes, mentally visualizing the building's schematics. Where was the fastest escape route Mila could take without being seen? Who, if not Mila, had set off the alarms?

"Someone else must've gotten the brilliant idea to rob the gallery on opening day, same as us," Victor concluded. "Except this time, they got caught."

"Well, they're going to start looking in the vents pretty soon," Mila grunted, clearly still trying to reach her destination. "Any brilliant ideas, now would be the time."

If you knew someone was going to shoot you, you picked their pockets and the bullets. If you were backed into a corner, you cut a hole through the floor. If you were caught in the middle of a plan with no safeguards and were stuck in a vent, you somehow found a way to wriggle your way out. It was the way Victor thought about problems, what he was trained to do. Rotate the pieces of the puzzle until they fell into place.

Slowly, the beginnings of a new plan formed in Victor's mind.

"Babicheva," he began cautiously. "How fast do you think you can crack a safe?"

-::-

"These are the ones you wanted?" Mila asked, nodding towards the street six feet below her balcony.

Victor shook himself from his memories and joined her at the railing with two quick strides, leaning over the edge to look at the two people on the pavement below. Even from the great height, he could tell they were the ones he was looking for. The ones he reached out to the day before. A woman with jet-black hair and tawny skin next to a tall man with a short crop of blonde hair and wide-rimmed glasses. He couldn't risk leaving Mila's apartment in fear of being seen, so the redhead had volunteered to deliver handwritten messages herself.

"I guess I'll buzz them in then," Mila sighed and leapt away from the edge.

He took another look at the two figures down below.

It hadn't been hard to find others that had suffered at the hands of Blackwell's holding company, especially since Victor had worked there and knew where to start. He was forgetful about certain things—birthdays, holidays, the last time he cut his hair, but he hadn't forgotten a single detail when it came to the holding company. The security systems, the lines on balance sheets, everything.

Mila had been right about one thing. Between the three of them, there wasn't enough manpower to take down a corporate giant. But it didn't take long for Victor to pinpoint two others he wagered were in deep enough to consider helping him—people with the skill sets he needed for the plan to work, people who were desperate enough to grab at any chance for money, people who were in enough pain to want revenge.

"Sara Crispino and Christophe Giacometti," he greeted as the door to Mila's apartment door clicked open again.

The tawny-skinned woman regarded him curiously with large eyes, and the tall man gave him an amicable wave.

"I would offer you guys a chair, but as you can see, our apartment has none."

 _"My_ apartment," Mila corrected as she joined Yuuri on the floor. "You only crash here."

The chemist hadn't said a word to him since the day before, and Victor was starting to wonder if he was missing his old life, didn't know how to approach Victor or Mila, was just _incredibly_ quiet, or a grand combination of all three. He made a mental note to try to talk to Yuuri afterwards. They needed to communicate and to move on from what happened in the warehouse for the job to succeed.

"I'm assuming you guys both came because you got our message, so you know why we're here," he continued. He pointed to each of the five people gathered in the apartment as he named them. "In case any of us don't know each other, Christophe Giacometti, Sara Crispino, Mila Babicheva, Yuuri with two U's and an I. And I'm Victor Nikiforov."

"How do we know we can trust you?" Sara asked. She frowned disapprovingly as she observed Mila's belongings spread out on the floor.

"I really don't have a good answer to that," Victor replied honestly. "But if it's worth anything, there's nothing any of us would gain from selling anyone out. We're here because we have no other choice, and if we're getting into bed together, we might as well trust each other."

"It's a big bed," the guy named Christophe observed. He pushed his glasses further up on his nose and shrugged. Throughout the conversation, he looked less like someone who was witnessing the law being broken in front of his eyes and more like someone looking at a casual baseball game. Not bored or disinterested, not excited or eager, just curious to see the outcome.

"You're on board then?" Mila asked from her position on the floor.

The tall blonde shrugged. "I suppose if you guys are serious about doing this, I will be."

"How can you guys be so _casual_ about this?" Sara blurted. "Your note said that you wanted my help in trying to _scam someone—"_

"—you can think about it as playing a joke on someone gullible enough to fall for it if you'd like," Victor countered.

"To steal their money."

"Relieve them of certain belongings."

"To break the law."

"It's an acquired taste."

Sara glared at him half-heartedly, then sighed. "You sought me out because you knew I would be out of options. And it's true. But I still don't like this idea, any of it. What if we fail and get caught? Thrown into jail? What then?"

Victor hesitated, then launched into explanation.

"The holding company that screwed us all over is planning something. They're planning to release a type of stem rust into the crops this coming season before the harvest. With their strain of wheat being the only one resistant to the virus, the supply of wheat this year will be so low that they'll be able to monopolize it."

"A famine," Yuuri offered helpfully.

"An opportunity," Victor corrected. "For them, anyway. Their research companies and agricultural companies own the wheat. It's simple supply and demand. When supply is low, prices are high. When it's the only supplier in the market, it turns into a monopoly. And given recent events, there's no way to tie the outbreak back to them either. They won't face any responsibility from the law."

He took a deep breath.

"We all want the same things. Money, security, revenge. But I'm not _just_ asking you to join us for personal satisfaction. I'm asking you because I believe somewhere out there, there's a city worth saving, and I'm asking if you want to do the right thing. To do what needs to be done and get back what we're owed while we're at it."

He looked into Christophe's serene eyes, then into Sara's agitated ones.

"I can't guarantee you anything. I can't tell you that you won't get arrested. But if you're willing to put everything you got into this, then I will do the same."

Victor held their gazes.

"So if you're ready to get to work, so am I."

-::-

"You know what the problem with Blackwell Holdings is?" Victor asked the group. He didn't wait for a reply. "It's too big. Too many branches. Too many targets to hit. He can't look everywhere, so we hit where he's not looking."

Sara frowned. "Aren't we trying to stop them from releasing the virus?"

Victor shook his head. "Not directly. We can't steal a pathogen, not when it's already in existence. If we steal it, even if we can, we give away the fact that we're after him but he still releases it anyway. It's easy enough to get other samples."

Mila stretched, her thin arms reaching towards the ceiling. They were all sitting on the floor now, gathered around a diagram of all of Blackwell Holding's subsidiaries, every shell company and every cent of their enemy's empire. Victor drew up the web of corporations himself.

Upon first glance, the map was overwhelming. Blackwell's empire had deep roots running all over the city, in every corner and industry. International influence, prestige, money, resources. Victor and the crew didn't have any of those things, but their enemies certainly did. And yet, to Victor, it was not a diagram of an impossible task. To him, it looked like a map of all their targets.

"We destroy his reputation and his holdings first," she replied through a yawn. "If we try to release the information we have to the public _now_ , no one will believe it. Not to mention it would draw unnecessary attention to ourselves for uncovering their schemes in the most illegal way possible. _But_ if the holding company's reputation is in tatters, it'll be an easy thing to believe. Blackwell might have county judges in his pocket, but even they can't stop a public uproar."

"So we hit where the mark isn't looking," Victor added.

"Somewhere that has a decent amount of money and influence for us to take a swing at but not one of the abandoned projects that are worthless," Mila explained. "We want to relieve him of his belongings, but only the ones that are still valuable. The ones he wants. Otherwise we'll just be clearing out trash by taking down the businesses that are already lost causes, the ones towards the bottom."

"I like the bottom," Chris offered in support.

"Thank you, Chris," Mila continued without pausing for breath. "We hit where the mark isn't looking but not where the mark has _stopped_ looking."

Victor nodded along as she explained.

Though the others in the room had close to no experience with running a con—Sara probably never even drove above the speed limit—he and Mila still knew how to get the job done. They planned with the same strategies, thought on the same wavelength, understood each other without needing to speak. Somehow, after their first heist together, Victor had come to realize that they were inexplicably compatible partners for crime.

"Victor and I have worked jobs like this before," Mila continued. She moved her hands across the diagram in front of them as she spoke, each finger coming down hard on the paper as she passed over an option. "The ones I'm pointing to all deal with sales of a consumer product, and those would be the easiest to target."

She grinned wickedly.

"Some of these are pretty well-off, but since managing them takes minimal effort, Blackwell most likely doesn't pay attention to them. Their own board of directors or whatever runs their own plans and they check in with the big boss every now and then. That makes it easy for us because they most likely won't know any of our faces even though we've all run into some part of this empire at one point or another."

Mila hesitated.

"Victor's the only one they _might_ recognize," she amended. "But that's a simple fix. All we have to do is keep him away from the front line."

Victor made a grunt of agreement. He would stick to the back of their plans, hover in the shadows and act as backup if necessary. Plan out the job but not be the central piece to any of their schemes. His mind was already racing ahead to safeguards, equipment, practice, planning his way from A to Z. It would take a lot of work and training an inexperienced crew, but Victor already had the makings of another puzzle falling into place in his mind.

"We hit the winery first," Victor concluded. He glanced over to Mila, who nodded and shrugged. Victor took it as a sign of approval. "It's the spring, which means they're preparing for the harvesting season. Spring's the _marketing_ season, so we market something of our own."

Sara frowned, deep lines etched between her eyebrows.

"The winery?" she asked, face set in a deep scowl. " _The_ wine company?"

"I believe it is called something like Grape Barks?" Victor offered helpfully, but Sara's frown only deepened.

"Grape _Marks_ ," she corrected.

Victor knew the winery was a sour topic for Sara, just as the bank was a sour spot for him and the mountain climbing company was for Christophe. The way Massive Dynamic would come to be the dark spot no one was allowed to poke and prod at for Yuuri. Whatever the touchy subject was for Mila, he never bothered to ask. No child grew up thinking that one day they would become a criminal—they all started _somewhere,_ and usually that somewhere was a topic that was closed off.

The company had driven Sara deep into debt and forced her to keep moving from one place to the next, always looking over her shoulder. Victor knew enough details about what happened to know to contact her for the job, but he suspected only she knew the full truth. Despite his curiosity, Victor certainly wasn't going to pry further.

"I told you," he told her instead with a small shrug. "We aren't just here for money or security. We're here for revenge too. We might as well start with yours."

The frown did not leave her face as Mila continued walking the crew through the con.

"It's a common enough con," she explained. "Usually this takes a few people to pull off, but let's just say that we dress Victor up to look more respectable than he can ever hope to be and set him up in a fancy restaurant."

Victor scowled. "I _am_ respectable."

Mila waved him off. "He pretends that he's a travelling musician from Russia and has left his wallet at the hotel he's staying at. So he leaves his violin with the waiter as collateral, saying that it is his whole life's work."

"I don't play violin," Victor corrected under his breath.

"The violin acts like an insurance to the waiter. He keeps it under the assumption that no matter what, Victor will come back and retrieve it."

"But if the violin's worthless, he just leaves and doesn't pay?" Yuuri asked. He frowned, glasses slipping out of place. Victor resisted the irrational urge to reach across the floor and adjust them.

 _Focus on the job,_ he told himself, shaking his head. _What the hell are you thinking?_

Mila grinned her devilish grin. "Not exactly. If you're good and if you have multiple people in on this, you can do a whole lot more than a dine and dash. You see, Victor could also make an offhanded comment about how the violin is a common make and model, precious only to him because it is a family heirloom or something. Maybe even saying that after another year or so, he would be looking to sell it at a low price. Victor's smart—broadly speaking—he can think of something."

"What do you mean, _broadly speaking?"_

Excited now, Mila got onto her knees, her eyes glinting.

"But then as Victor's going to retrieve his wallet, another member of our crew approaches the waiter—let's just say it's me," she continued. "I tell the waiter that the violin is actually a stradivarius, I present him with my credentials and expertise and fancy violin-related lingo. I tell him that if I were him, I would buy it from the man at a low price right then and there and sell it for its real worth later. Obviously, I make up some excuse for not being able to purchase the violin myself. It would be illegal for me to purchase it for my company while one party operates under false assumptions."

"It's not _technically_ illegal, in case you ever want to know," Victor interrupted.

"Yeah, but the waiter doesn't know that," Mila barreled on. "Some excuse or the other later, he is convinced he knows the violin is valuable but the only other buyer is incapable of buying at the moment. He offers to pay any amount for it when Victor gets back. Steadily, Victor raises the price. Since a real stradivarius costs upwards of ten million at the very least, Victor pauses at a good half million to make the con believable and before the waiter decides it's too much."

Mila took a deep breath. "The waiter just paid for a worthless piece of junk, and the two people behind the con are now half a million richer."

Victor looked around the room. Mila was always passionate about her work, the cons, the history of their jobs, and where they got their inspiration from. Personally, Victor couldn't have cared less—as long as the job was done, it didn't matter to him if the con originated in the Middle Ages or if it was invented by a conniving goat herder. But as he looked around, he saw understanding dawn on everyone's faces. Sara still looked displeased at the prospect of breaking the law, and Christophe was quiet as ever.

"The con's called a fiddle game," he told them. "Except the fiddle is not always a violin."

"So like a bottle of wine?" Yuuri offered.

 _A good plan, but a prized bottle of wine would be harder to fake,_ Victor thought. _Why go through the effort of faking something that's thousands of years old when you can use what's in front of you?_

"Not exactly," Victor answered. "Sara, how are your skills as a wine connoisseur?"

She frowned again. "Why does it matter?"

"Because you're going to be our fiddle."

"I'm not a violin," she snapped.

"I know," Victor explained. He knew he hadn't exactly used the best word choice in his previous sentence, but Sara was still the best at her job, and they would need her skills for the plan to work. "You know what they do as part of marketing their products? They have a contest—between sommeliers. High-profile guests and sponsors like to place bets. They gamble. Take risks."

He took a deep breath.

"We're going to convince the people in charge of that godforsaken winery that you're the best at what you do. Get them to place the biggest bet of their lifetime. And then we're going to take their money from right under their noses and give it back to you."

The frown on Sara's face was gone, now replaced by a mixture of displeasure and confusion. Victor thought it was an improvement.

"Don't think of it as breaking the law," Mila advised, patting her gently on the shoulder. "It's a bad mentality for success. We have lots of time to prepare, so just think about it like a job. Preparing for another show."

 _As soon as you start worrying about right and wrong according to the law, you lose focus,_ Victor thought. _The world has twisted the law so many times already it doesn't matter. Anything can be a fact if you tell it the right way, and you have to make your own justice from time to time._

"Why do you talk about this as if it's an occupation?" Sara asked, finally sighing in resignation.

Mila blinked and then frowned, clearly confused.

"This _is_ my occupation."


	6. Chapter Six: Non-Monetary Profit

**Special note: I think it's honestly amazing what sommeliers can do? I've watched so many videos of their competitions that Youtube recommends me wine videos now. I swear, their taste buds are a human superpower?**

 **I** **also apologize in advance for any grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. :( I'm going on a trip this weekend, so the chapter's getting released a day early without the proper editing my beta and I usually would've done. Not that we're flawless or perfect anyway.** **Word count: 4,554.**

* * *

Chapter Six: Non-Monetary Profit

The beard itched.

Mila had almost laughed herself silly when she put it over his chin that morning. A seamless job blending in where the fake beard connected with skin, and Victor doubted anyone would have been able to tell it wasn't real without closer inspection. It was a short beard that matched the color of his hair, which Mila also combed back.

"It's unlikely anyone there will know your face," she had said earlier that morning. "But some simple party tricks to throw off anyone who might recognize you won't hurt."

So now he stood towards the back of the wine festival, away from the swaths of people lining up to see the competitions begin.

The Victor he was about a year ago might've looked around the room and saw one job opportunity after another. There were many, _many_ wealthy businessmen gathered in the winery that day. Wine, after all, was a rich man's drink. Even Sara admitted that serving good wine was all about showing off status and class, and one look at the expensive name brand watches and suits confirmed her assessment.

But, the Victor he was now looked around the room and saw a different type of job opportunity. One that involved relieving people of their wallets.

"Aren't you more of a sommelier than a connoisseur?" he whispered into his earbud.

All five of them had the earbuds he and Mila had used on their first job together. All connected and able to hear what the others said, mixed in with the occasional background noise and other conversations. Even though he knew they could all hear him, it was obvious the question had been directed at Sara. Admittedly, the earbuds worked better when there were only two people involved—five different conversations became a hectic backdrop of noise in Victor's ear every once in a while.

"No," Sara replied with a haughty sniff. "Sommeliers work in restaurants and pair up wine with their dishes. I don't work in a restaurant, and I drink wine to get _money_."

"But you're sure you can compete in the experts category? It's not too late to change."

She gave another sigh of exasperation, and Victor knew they had been over the topic a thousand times during their planning. Whatever mismatched sets of skills he had picked up over the years, wine tasting was _not_ one of them. He knew Sara was the best at her trade, but he had no bar to compare with.

"Guess that's a no," he whispered and turned to a platter of cheese he pretended to inspect. Posing as a guest going to the wine festival had been easy enough, especially since no one spared him a second glance. Still, he needed to look and act the part, especially if one of the overly-enthusiastic sellers waylaid him.

As part of their promotions, the winery held competitions. Anyone could enter at any level—people who were new to wine, enthusiasts, those who sold wine for a living, and the experts. As Victor looked around the crowded winery, he saw the manager standing next to the company's CEO. One winery belonging to one company belonging to one shell company belonging to another parent company belonging to one large holding company.

 _The mafia has a less complicated set-up,_ Victor thought to himself bitterly.

The one winery wasn't much, but it was a start.

"I've got eyes on the mark," Victor whispered into his earbud. "They're gonna be placing small bets at first at the amateur level competition. Try to get other people to bet as well, then raise the stakes steadily as they move up the brackets. It's a common foot-in-the-door technique."

Of course, this had all been planned out from the beginning.

"Mila, how's your situation like?"

"In position," her voice replied. "There's not much to do."

"Okay, good. Don't get caught. Chris, Yuuri, you two place bets with the marks in a little bit. Doesn't matter who you're betting against or for, just make sure it's a small amount of cash."

He got up from the platter of cheese, moving further and further towards the back as more and more people milled into the building. The little cabin-like building hosting the festival was large, with wooden walls and a floor, and spacious enough to accommodate everyone. Still, Victor would've liked some more space. Partly so he could keep a clear line of sight to everyone else in the crew, particularly Sara, partly so he could avoid another guest overhearing him whispering into the earbud. He didn't want to get pegged as a madman talking to a platter of cheese and escorted out before the show even started.

Sara Crispino sat towards the front, near the raised platform that had been assembled on one end of the building. Victor knew she was more than capable of handling a couple high-end wines, but she still looked nervous as she sat in one of the rickety wooden chairs lining the building, twiddling her thumbs and looking nervous. Nervous _and_ guilty.

"Sara, there's only one other competitor in your level," he whispered into the earbud. "Usually, there isn't even a fair _competition_ at the expert level because all the sommeliers are busy doing whatever they do, and Grape Charts has to bring someone up from the lower levels and make it look like an actual competition. The gambling's also easier to fix that way."

"Grape _Marks,_ " she corrected him.

"Don't look so nervous. You look guilty even though you haven't done anything. Stop twiddling your thumbs and biting your lip and glancing back at me. Think of it as the only opportunity you will get to screw over the people who scammed you."

She snorted softly, but her posture still remained rigid.

"I'm a man of entrepreneurship," Victor joked. "I create opportunities. Like a businessman."

"You're a thief."

"That's what I just said, isn't it?"

This time, she laughed, and even from the other side of the room, Victor could see her posture relaxed.

"You know the grapes best," he whispered before turning his attention on Yuuri and Chris, both standing with their backs against the wall on either side of the room.

"Go place a bet, both of you" he urged. "Try to act natural. Remember all the practice you've done with us. Remember all the tricks. They're not expecting someone to run a con on them today, so you should be fine even if you stumble a little bit."

He started moving again, trying to get away from the ever-growing crowd of people. With a quick glance around the room, it became apparent he wasn't going to find space anytime soon. Instead, Victor settled for the last rickety chair in the last row, the farthest from the stage, just as he heard Chris stopping the winery's manager with an almost comically thick French accent.

"Good," he whispered to the earbud. "Accents can throw the people off from any nervous tremors in your voice."

Twisting around in his seat, he spared the other two crew members a quick glance.

Christophe Giacometti had been quiet during their preparation for the job—always standing around silently and piping up only to ask a question or make a light, usually sexual joke. As their two weeks of preparation passed by, Victor found himself at ease around the part-time mountain guide. They had a mutual respect for each other's boundaries and abilities, and that was something Victor valued greatly.

On the other hand, Victor came to realize that he had completely misjudged Yuuri based on their first meeting. Whereas he had thought Yuuri's skillset would be limited considering their job, it turned out that his vast knowledge of chemistry and other odd skills were more than necessary. There were days during their planning where he simply sat and stared at the way Yuuri's well-practiced fingers moved across the rows of pipets they'd procured for his experiments or watching him and Mila pour over chemicals to melt vibration-sensitive glassware.

At one point, he and Yuuri had been talking through the open door, with Victor seated on Mila's hardwood floor and Yuuri standing on the balcony as he looked out across the city. The red glow of dawn was just starting to creep into the sky, and memories of the warehouse seemed a lifetime behind them at the time.

"How's criminal life suiting you?" Victor had asked.

Yuuri laughed, a laugh that sounded like music itself to Victor's ears. A sound he wanted to bottle up and listen to again and again as he fell asleep every day.

"Surprisingly well," Yuuri replied. "I miss my family, but I'm never alone here."

"Well, I suppose there's that."

"What about you? Do you miss your family?"

Victor had looked up at the question, startled. And as his eyes landed on Yuuri, the well-practiced lies he told everyone who asked that question simply turned to ash in his mouth. The sun had just begun to peek over the horizon, its rays illuminating Yuuri's head like a halo on a backdrop of a vibrant, watercolor sky. His eyes were closed, lashes plastered to his cheeks, and his face was turned to the wind gently dancing between dark locks of hair.

"Yes," Victor answered without thinking. "I do."

Yuuri had left it at that. But since then, Victor told himself to never lose focus like that again—he needed to concentrate, to bury himself back beneath the piles of work and planning without a second of distraction.

And yet.

 _It's like he's always creating music with his body, like he's in front of a piano no one else can see,_ Victor thought as he watched Yuuri's fingers twiddle with the edge of his slightly-too-big suit. Victor had told him that the suit was ugly and that the finger-twiddling was the easiest tell for a mark to pick up on, but the winery manager seemed to happily answer his questions without a hint of suspicion.

 _"C'était un plaisir d'avoir fait des affaires avec vou,"_ he heard Chris say with a slight bow before walking away. "Pleasure to have done business with you."

 _Indeed,_ thought Victor. _Now that the manager and CEO knows both of their faces, they'll be more likely to agree to engage in high-stake gambling later._

"The winery's own sommelier is competing at the experts level," Victor whispered into his earpiece. "They'll be betting on him as part of the gambling rules. He's won this little competition in the past five years, though I suspect a fair bit of cheating is involved. Our goal is to get the manager and the CEO to believe that it is in their best interests to bet on Sara instead, that betting on their own man is a lost cause."

Of course, everyone already knew their plans. But at five minutes before the expert level competition would start, Victor thought it would not be a bad idea to remind them.

"The competition happens in three stages, in increasing difficulty. At the end of the second round, we have to make it obvious enough that there is no way the winery's own sommelier will win."

"That'll be easy," Sara grumbled.

"The final bet is high-stake, sometimes upwards of five hundred thousand," Victor continued. "It's a rich man's drink, it's a rich man's game. The manager and CEO against the rest of the audience. The audience gathers up their money by transferring their funds into a bank account under the competition's name, the _pot_ of money so to speak. Winner cashes out. We're going to make sure the audience wins this time."

He paused, giving the fake beard another tug.

"Everyone knows what to do?"

Victor heard four muttered answers of "yes" come through the earbud.

"Let's do this then."

-::-

The headline had flashed across the television screen, and at once, Victor bolted to attention.

 _Breaking News: Responsible Party Behind Art Gallery's Stolen Monet Found._

The news camera zoomed in on the door of the art gallery, reporters milling around the steps leading up to the entrance. Cameras flashed, and Victor's heart had skipped two beats as he waited in anticipation to see what would come next. Would the news anchor flash a picture of Mila's face across the screen? Would they announce that Victor Nikiforov was responsible, the very same person who designed the building's security?

Behind him, he heard footsteps approach. Someone must've unlocked the door without him hearing.

"What are you watching?" came Mila's voice from behind him. Her footsteps made squelching noises as her wet feet padded their way across her hardwood floor.

"Look," Victor replied, pointing at the haphazardly arranged television set in Mila's apartment. "They found out."

She ran a towel through her wet hair and plopped down next to him. He could feel the steam from the shower radiating off of her. Maybe it was the last shower she would get to take in a long while. The last time either of them got to walk freely through the streets.

"And?" she had asked.

"They haven't said anything else yet."

It had been almost a week since their heist at the museum. A week since the heist they attempted went wrong.

 _I don't want to go to jail,_ he thought. A stupid, childish wish considering the evidence trail they left behind that day. An evidence trail a mile long.

Before Victor had the chance to say another word, the camera zoomed in even further, and in another series of bursting camera flashes, Victor saw the man they lead out of the art gallery's door. He could recognize the shiny, bald head anywhere, and unconsciously, his lips curled into a smile as he recognized the art gallery's owner. Next to him, Mila whooped and punched his arm.

The running text on the news now read: _Gallery Owner Arrested For Hard Insurance Fraud._

"They found it!" Mila hooted gleefully. "They finally caught on."

"Finally," Victor agreed, his smile growing wider. The smile felt foreign on his face, like his cheeks were stiff and hadn't been stretched in a long time. In retrospect, it _had_ been a long time since he smiled.

"Babicheva, how fast do you think you can crack a safe?" he had asked after the museum's alarms came on.

"I'm not the best," she had responded. "It would probably take a minute or two. Why?"

"Because I need you to crack a safe. Fast."

"And why would I need to do that?"

He explained to plan to her, as quickly as he could. Even as he spoke, he could hear Mila dropping down from the vent and the sound of ripping canvas. They weren't _just_ working together now—working together implied they each had their own, separate ideas. In that particular moment of crisis, their muscles worked in sync, their thoughts raced in sync, their hearts beat in sync, and they worked as one.

"Got the canvas," she said with a grunt. Victor heard the grate slam shut as Mila hauled herself back into the vent.

"Good," he told her. "You can't scale up three floors from inside a vent, so you'll have to go through stairwell again."

"Already a step ahead of you," she replied in between grunts. "Have to dodge the cameras, I know."

"Exactly. It's even more important now that the gallery knows there are thieves in the building. So we might as well beat them to the punch. We don't have to bother replacing the real Monet with a fake either."

"We pray we get out of here without getting caught while the real thieves take the fall. Got it."

He heard the clanging of a grate and the sound of Mila lightly running up the stairs.

"Still exiting the same way then?"

"Same way," Victor had confirmed. "Just with one more extra stop on the way."

"I'm going to have respiratory issues after I'm done with these dusty vents," Mila huffed as Victor heard the sound of another grate opening.

She was on the top floor now, the floor with the gallery owner's office and safe. They had been fortunate to avoid security in the stairwell, but Victor knew he was pushing their luck with the improvised scheme. He also knew that Mila could pull the fire alarm and exit the building immediately, right then and right there, without any extra stops or risks. In fact, if Mila had walked out of the gallery's doors at that moment, she could have doubled their money. Why she was going the extra mile was a mystery to Victor, but he suspected she also had her own agenda when it came to bringing down the art gallery's owner.

"Keep going until you hit a junction," Victor told her, visualizing the schematics. "Take a left and the second opening should lead you to his office."

"I put the real Monet painting in the gallery owner's safe," she continued. "After the gallery reports the robbery, no one will bother to double check to see if a painting on sale is genuine because they'll assume we were the ones who stole it. So we can fence the fake and get our cash."

"Meanwhile, the insurance company who secured all of this gallery's artwork will come to investigate a multi-million dollar claim on a stolen painting."

"They find the _real_ stolen painting in the owner's safe and determine it's genuine after a few tests. He gets accused of paying thieves to steal his own painting, his claim is denied, he gets arrested on charges of insurance fraud among other things, and we get our money," Mila concluded as Victor heard her open the last grate.

"Hurry," he urged.

"I'm trying, Nikiforov."

A few minutes and a cracked safe later, he saw Mila run from the building, s tolen lab coat and uniform trailing behind her while sounds of the fire alarm echoed. Victor figured she had changed after emerging from the vent but before pulling the fire alarm. After that, it had been just a simple trip back down the stairs and out the door, not a single hint of suspicion from the guards.

"Go, go, go," she yelled at him as she slipped into the passenger seat.

Without another word, Victor gave the keys a twist. The engine roared, and their getaway car lurched into motion as Mila cheered.

"What if the owner decides to look inside his safe before the insurance investigator comes to take a look?" she asked him after the wailing siren faded into the background.

"I doubt it," he chuckled. "The guy doesn't keep anything in there, does he?"

Mila shook her head.

"I'll get your stuff and our fake later," he assured her. "It's still in the vents, right?"

"Yup."

"Why did you do it?" he asked as he guided the car around a bend. "You could've fenced both the real and the fake, and you could've doubled the profit. Why would you sacrifice millions of dollars on an uncertain chance to get the owner arrested?"

She tilted her head, considering his question.

"If he does get arrested for hard insurance fraud—and it's a very high chance—then his other crimes will come into light as well. Blackmail, intimidation, embezzlement, breach of contracts. There's no way he would be able to escape those charges this time. It might not be much, but at least the families and the people he screwed over will get a chance to get their justice."

"Justice?" Victor had repeated.

"It's a non-monetary type of profit."

-::-

"The wine gives off a dark red glow," Sara declared after giving the wine a sniff and holding it up to the light. She talked with lightning speed, moving from one aspect of wine identification to the next. Below the stage and seated in the front row, Victor saw the four judges scribbling furiously. "There are traces of sediment or carbon dioxide. This vintage was matured in an oak barrel but I would like to confirm this later on the palate."

"Even if the CEO and the manager has the judges under their belts, they have to play by the rules," Victor whispered into the earbud. "They're given a sheet of the right answers to the characteristics of each wine as part of the game to make it look real. It would be too easy to expose this competition as a scam if they refused to include the rules or judged incorrectly, so they have to mark everything she says as right or wrong."

"Shut up, Victor," he heard Mila's voice whisper back. "Sara's concentrating."

Sara cleared her throat on the stage and shot Victor a glare. He gave her an apologetic look and obediently held his tongue. She was under a timed limit, just like the other contestants, but Victor had faith in her to do what she did best, especially after the winery's own sommelier got less than a quarter of the correct characteristics on the first wine. It was a practice round, but they needed Sara to be _absolutely flawless_ to convince their targets.

Still sitting in the spotlight behind a white tablecloth and a glass of red wine, Sara held the wine glass daintily by the stem and gave it a sniff.

"The nose is clean, the wine is healthy," she continued. "Strong aromas of blackberry and blackberry skin with a dash of plum."

 _How the hell can she_ _smell the difference between blackberry and blackberry_ skin? Victor thought. _They're the same thing. They smell exactly the same._

Now, she gave the glass a little twirl and sniffed it again.

"Viscosity is high. After aeration, the plum aroma comes forward along with a little touch of lemon and lime. Also a pinch of minerality. Limestone, I would say. The intensity has also increased."

Victor had seen many things in his life. He had seen buildings go up in flames, he had stolen Monet paintings and stem rust resistant strains of wheat, and he had seen more than enough to know that most of the time, "impossible" really meant "improbable." There were things one could achieve beyond ordinary imagination, but even Victor could not fathom the scene before his eyes.

Sara's nose and senses, he concluded, should have been beyond human capacity. Because no one on the entire godforsaken planet should have been able to smell the difference between blackberry and blackberry _skin._

And yet, the row of judges beneath the stage looked just as stunned as him, and the furious scratches of their pens on paper told him she was probably hitting just about every detail on their checklist.

"The palate is low in dryness, definitely matured in oak barrel," Sara said after taking a sip and swirling the liquid around in her mouth before spitting it back out into a small plastic cup on the table. "Acidity levels are high and intense, but tannin levels are soft and low. Intensity of flavor is medium-plus with an emphasis on the blackberry skins."

Murmurs ran through the crowd.

The last sommelier had stumbled his way through naming different aspects of the wine. He ran out of time after sniffing the wine over and over again to the disdainful looks from Sara, and the judges declared he had hit less than a quarter of the items on their little checklist. Blind tasting was not a very accurate practice, and Victor knew that. In fact, he had heard that getting even around a quarter of the characteristics during in blind taste correct was a sign of a talented sommelier.

 _But Sara is on a completely new level,_ he thought in awe.

"Level of alcohol is high, but it is well-supported by the strong fruit flavors and tapers off in a medium-length finish," Sara said. She took another sip of the wine and spat it back out as well. "I think it is a rather good wine, and I would say to drink this wine within the next four months to keep the acidity and flavor intense. Serve at low room temperatures or below room temperature to minimize the effects of alcohol and maximize the intensity of the fruits."

Victor had never been particularly interested in wine. He was more of a vodka drinker himself, but after this performance, he would consider branching out just for the sake of trying to taste the difference between blackberry and blackberry skin.

A soft clap broke out over the audience, but Sara simply held up her hand to silence the solitary fan.

 _She has this entire place wrapped around her finger,_ he thought.

"I'm not finished," she told the audience. "There is only one wine this can be. It is a Pinot Noir, or Spätburgunder. The grapes come from Burgundy region in France, and the vintage is no older than 2010 but no younger than 2014."

Victor couldn't help it.

As soon as she finished, he started laughing. Laughing at the stunned faces of the audience, of the judges, of the winery's manager and CEO. He laughed until his sides hurt and until he had trouble standing up along with the rest of the audience in the standing ovation. There was nothing particularly _funny_ about the situation, but just for a moment, he felt like a little boy who believed in magic again, watching all the pieces of their plan fall into place, watching Sara perform miracles on stage.

 _There is no way this plan can go wrong now,_ he thought to himself. _Not after that performance._

A couple rows in front of them, he saw Yuuri glance over his shoulder, most likely concerned by Victor's fits of uncontrollable laughter. Next to him, Chris swiveled around and cast Victor a look as well, one eyebrow raised and a mischievous smile playing at his lips.

"Sara, you're scary," Chris whispered.

Even at a distance, Victor saw Sara's face break out into a grin from her spot on the stage.


	7. Chapter Seven: Monetary Profit

**I am deeply sorry about the delay with this chapter. School's started for me, and I am exponentially busier now that I'm a senior (in high school). So the updating schedule has also changed. :( I'm going to try to update once every other weekend instead of every weekend now. Word count: 4,814.**

* * *

Chapter Seven: Monetary Profit

"How's it going?" Victor whispered into the earbud.

The second round of the competition had flashed by in a breeze. If Victor closed his eyes, he could still see Sara as she held the glass up to her nose, sniffing the dark liquid. The wine connoisseur had identified the second wine with ease, named spices Victor didn't even know existed, and now the room was filled with excited chatter as people placed their bets. He looked around the winery, trying to gauge how much people had placed money on Sara. Judging by the smug looks on the people around him, Victor would say the stakes would be some of the highest in the winery's history.

 _Everyone wants to take a risk when they think they're going to win,_ he thought to himself with a smile. _That's good for us because we've convinced them they're going to get their money's worth._

"Chris has transferred pretty much everything in his account to the pot," Yuuri replied.

"Good," Victor said. "We drive the stakes up as high as we can. The company has to match our price, so whatever's in that account is going to end up doubling."

It was a simple trick Victor had learned during his days working security. Many of his employers were rich and spent most of their time blowing through their piles of money by gambling, and Victor had taken time to familiarize himself with the practice.

Of course, if it were up to Victor, he would drive the price up even further. He didn't have much in his bank account to begin with, barely enough to collect interest, but neither he nor Yuuri could risk transferring their funds into an account associated with Blackwell-owned companies, even if the account was made under another person's name. Chris, being the only one of them with enough funds to make a substantial transfer, was the only one who could engage in the gambling activities.

Victor wasn't one for piety, but he whispered a quick prayer that Chris would get his money back and that Sara would get what she was owed nonetheless. That the job would go according to plan.

He spared his phone a quick glance. Remote-accessing bank accounts from one's phone was one of the most useful things invented in the last decade, and now he watched as the numbers in the pot slowly climbed up. When the third round started, the company would double the audience's prices. Once the outcome was determined, all the money in the pot would return to their rightful owners.

 _Every year in the past five years, the company has won,_ Victor reminded himself. _They took all of the money._

Another glance onto the stage and Victor saw fresh glasses and cups being laid out on top of the white tablecloth—one in front of Sara, another in front of her opponent. A lithe red-haired attendant in a rumpled suit poured two separate vintages into the glasses, a white handkerchief covering the wine's identity and year. They would be revealed after the competitors had made their final judgements on the wine.

"Everybody ready?" Victor asked again as the attendant bowed and moved off the stage, red hair in a neat bun.

He didn't need to hear the voices that answered him next. Victor knew they were ready, that all their weeks of preparation for the job lead up to this. They would get Sara's money back—and her revenge.

Up on the stage, the wine connoisseur took the glass with her trembling hands and gave it a sniff.

-::-

"How did this Grape Parks company get one over on you anyway?" he had asked.

"Grape _Marks_ ," Sara had corrected, her expression turning sour.

It was a week before the job, and their little group of outcasts and thieves had been gathered around the building plans for the winery. Victor doubted they would need to make a quick getaway if everything went according to plan, but he made a point of having everyone memorize the exits, the entrances, the layout of the cellars underneath. Three of their five crew members were new to running cons and robbing rich people, and one could never know when something was going to go wrong.

"And they didn't get one over on me," she continued. "I lost in a bet that they fixed."

"Fixed?" Chris asked. "How do you fix a wine?"

Victor, too, had been confused by this. He knew that of course, it would be easy to bribe judges or to tell someone all the answers beforehand. But tactics like those did not hold up under close scrutiny, especially with the new regulations and audits that came with high-stakes gambling nowadays.

"It's simple, really," Sara explained. "I was part of a huge competition back in Italy, and the company had some people there. This was back when they were still looking to expand overseas, trying to get the lead on buying up vineyards in the area."

She sighed, crossing her legs.

"I bet on myself, of course, after winning every round in the preliminaries. And then I thought—why not go all in? I wanted to pay for my brother's studies, give him a nice little surprise. So I took out everything we had and put it on myself. I lost everything, of course, and I've been on the run from debt collectors and loan sharks ever since."

 _We all start somewhere,_ Victor realized. _We all ended up in this mess for the same reasons._

They had all tried to play by the rules, they obeyed the law, and they tried to look out for their families. Sara with her brother. Yuuri with his family. Victor with Yuri. But in the end, all that righteousness and love was only exploited by the holding company. No matter how hard one tried or how much one did for them, they took everything away in the end; Victor was living testimony of that.

 _People like that, corporations like that—they hold all the money, they hold all the power,_ he thought to himself bitterly. _And they use it to make little people like us go away._

"So they fixed the wine's composition?" Yuuri asked.

"Cornstarch," Sara had replied bitterly. "You add just a teaspoon of cornstarch to a glass of wine and it will change the color, the opacity, the tannins, the viscosity, and just about every single characteristic of the wine to something completely different. A drop of vanilla throws off the smell and the taste, and before you know it, the wine is something you can't recognize anymore."

She laughed without humor.

"Even the best sommeliers and the best connoisseurs can't identify something that has been tampered with."

"Do you think they'll use the same dirty tactics?" Victor had asked.

"Only if enough is on the line," Sara replied. "If the only thing that stands to lose is a couple thousand dollars, they won't raise a finger. If the audience thinks they don't stand a chance of winning, they don't bet as much. The company won't care about that—better to have some unlikely competitor win every once in awhile so it doesn't look like they've been fixing the previous competitions. Gives them more validity that way."

"But if half a million were at stake?"

"Then they would definitely cheat," Sara had concluded. "Definitely, _definitely_ cheat."

-::-

Victor glanced down at his phone again. With a jolt, he realized the account had around seven hundred thousand dollars.

 _If that's the case, they definitely tampered with Sara's wine,_ he thought, heartbeat racing. Victor's heart dropped to his stomach as he watched the wine connoisseur's expression turn blank. _She has no idea what is in that wine. No idea._

Next to her, her opponent started listing out qualities of his own glass, going through all the motions—twirling the wine around, taking a sip and spitting it back out. When he was done, the judges thanked him and the audience clapped wildly. Whereas she had clapped for the winery's sommelier the past two rounds, Sara simply sat motionless beside him now, still as the grave and eyes wide with panic.

Victor heard Mila say something over their earbuds, most likely directed at Sara, but he couldn't hear what she said, only the roaring in his ears. Murmurs rose from the audience as all eyes turned to Sara, who looked sickly green and clammy on top of the stage, eyes bulging.

"The wine gives off a golden-yellow glow, no traces of sediment or carbon dioxide." she stuttered. Those were probably the only things she _could_ identify with the tampering.

 _We're all screwed,_ Victor thought in a wild surge of panic. _Our plan has failed and we're losing everything._

A part of him knew it wouldn't do anyone any good if he suddenly started panicking in the middle of their con, but an even bigger part of him wanted to pull the plug on the plan entirely—screw the bet, the disguises, the itchy beard, the godforsaken winery, and especially the glasses of wine. If the plan had gone wrong in _any_ con, the first thing to do was to get the hell out.

After a long pause that seemed to stretch to eternity, Sara cleared her throat.

"The nose is clean, the wine is healthy," she continued, talking at the same lightning-fast pace she had used earlier. Victor's eyes widened at the sudden change. All of her indecision seemed to have slipped away from her frame, and she spoke once again with confidence. "Melon and ripe citrus fruits such as grapefruit and lime on the nose, subtle ginger and chamomile qualities in the background to add complexity."

The crowd clapped, and Victor saw the winery's manager and company CEO exchange surprised looks with each other.

She gave the glass a little stir, holding it delicately by the stem.

"Viscosity is medium-high. After aeration, the green melon aroma comes to the forefront along with a dash of honeydew. The intensity of its aromas has also increased."

His panic easily dissipating, Victor almost laughed at the expressions on their marks' faces before turning his attention back onto the stage. Sara, appearing to be enjoying herself, swirled the golden wine in her mouth before spitting it back out into the little cup in front of her.

"This wine has a honeyed palate," Sara continued. "This vintage was definitely matured in an oak barrel. Its acidity levels are medium-plus, but tannin levels are even higher and very well-rounded. Intensity of flavor is high with an emphasis on a surprise taste of honeydew, supported by the ginger. Alcohol levels are medium to medium-high. The wine takes a long time to taper off, but it finishes on a rather bitter note due to the impacts of the citrus."

She brushed off her hands, looking smug.

"I think this is a very good wine," Sara concluded. "Obviously, this wine is best served at a low temperature due to the medium to medium-high levels of alcohol, but it must not be served below sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit to minimize the sourness and bitter tang of the citrus components, which can overpower the honey and honeydew emphasis. There is only one wine this can be—the Verdejo of Spain, grown almost exclusively in the Rueda region. That is where the grapes come from, and I would say the vintage is a solid 2008."

The crowd roared to their feet, and Victor smiled as he stood, clapping slowly.

He was almost ashamed and wanted to chide himself for the moment of panic and indecision before. After all, they had planned for Sara to falter on stage, planned for the tampering with her wine, and he should not have been thrown off by the wine connoisseur's remarkably convincing acting.

 _She's turning into quite the grifter,_ he thought to himself. _Sara might have a knack for these things after all._

"Sara, you might have to sign some autographs," he whispered, tugging at his fake beard. If there was one thing he hated about the entire con, it was that itchy disguise. "Everyone else, clear out. Our work here is done."

"Made the call to the local police," Mila announced smugly over their earpieces. "They should be arriving any second now."

"Yeah, and you're probably the most wanted thief in the entire state, so we need to get out."

"I'm offended," Mila told him as she joined his side, her hair in a neat bun and her suit rumpled. Even with all the extra layers of clothing, Victor could pick out her knife-edge posture from any crowd. He hadn't heard her approach, but Victor supposed it was to be expected from the best cat burglar he had ever seen. "I'm _definitely_ the most wanted thief in the entire state."

Victor shook his head, smiling. It was weird to hear Mila's voice both in person and through the earbud, but Victor knew he couldn't take it out until Sara was in the clear as well.

"I disagree," he said as Chris and Yuuri joined them.

Together, the four of them started making their way towards the exit, and for the first time in a long time, Victor felt like he was surrounded by people he might just end up calling friends.

" _We're_ the most wanted thieves in the entire state."

-::-

Back in the car parked outside the winery, Victor heard the chaos before he saw it. The sound of a hundred different voices yelling and clamoring and trying to be heard over one another, Sara's voice the loudest above them all. She seemed to be enjoying herself as she hurled one insult after another towards the people Victor presumed to be the winery's manager and company's CEO. The din carried over from Sara's earpiece, and the wailing of sirens now joined the background. He knew the other members of their team could hear them, too.

"The local police have gotten faster," Chris remarked from the backseat. He nodded towards the cars parked outside, strobe lights flashing. "They came a minute earlier than we predicted."

"Doesn't matter, does it?" he heard Sara whisper quietly. She was still inside the winery while the others waited for her outside. "They're making the arrest now."

"You see, the thing with the fiddle con is that it relies on one thing," Victor explained. He couldn't keep the grin off his face, a small bubble of happiness rising in his chest. "We assume that the waiter, or the mark, is a dishonest person but not a criminal. Someone who would buy the fiddle for much less than it was worth, but not someone who would just steal the violin and make a run for it."

"And if the mark is a criminal?" Yuuri asked, swiveling around in shotgun to look at Victor.

"Well," Victor replied with a grin. His heart leapt as Yuuri returned the smile. "Well, if that's the case, we don't sell the mark a _fake_ fiddle. We present him with a _real_ one and let him get caught red-handed as he makes a run for it."

A second later, four armed police officers escorted two people out of the winery's door—Victor craned his neck, trying to get a good look, but he didn't need to see their faces to know they were the company's CEO and the winery manager, handcuffed and under arrest. As expected, they were followed by an angry crowd of people, most likely the gamblers, Sara in the lead. A fifth officer moved to stop her as she tried to step in front of the two, but she simply pushed past him and planted herself firmly in their paths.

"You know what your problem was?" Sara asked the two confused men in handcuffs. Somehow, despite being a good three inches shorter than them, Sara still managed to look down at the two. Victor heard her voice through the earbuds and saw the police officers halt as the wine connoisseur leaned in to whisper. "You were too busy watching me. Watching the numbers, watching me, watching the judges, watching where the money went, watching the bottle of wine you tampered with."

She leaned back and grinned.

"What you should've been watching was the one pouring the wine," Sara whispered, then turned heel and started walking towards their car.

From the backseat, Mila laughed.

Victor smiled again as their eyes met in the rearview mirror.

After Sara told them about the last time the company had taken her life's savings, they came prepared. The art of making sure Sara won the competition wasn't so much about making sure the company didn't cheat—it would've been impossible since they were the ones who picked out the wines and had access to all the vintages before the third round. There were too many bottles to keep track of, too many possibilities and guesses that they couldn't possibly predict.

 _When the odds are stacked against you, you change the game,_ Victor thought. _You cheat._

So they had agreed that Mila would impersonate one of their employees, an intern, the one who poured the wines for the contestants. The only one who could see the vintage's name and year besides the judges and the owners. It was Mila who relayed the basic information to Sara through their earbuds, and from there, the wine connoisseur's vast knowledge of the grapes gave her all she needed to know. They had been lucky with the vintage being made from grapes almost grown exclusively in one region, but Victor doubted missing one point of information would've changed the results either way.

By the time the third round started, by the time the audience became so engrossed with Sara's performance that their attention was not on their money, the company CEO and the winery's manager had already transferred the betted funds into corporate accounts. After all, how could one doubt the outcome of the competition if they were the ones who fixed it in the first place?

 _Everyone wants to take a risk when they think they're going to win._

The company had been too greedy, too sure of themselves, wanted to move quickly, and Sara's first moments of mock panic had given them the assurance they could transfer the funds away.

"They move the money to corporate accounts, yes?" Victor had explained during their planning. "Declaring their gambling money as corporate assets is perfectly legal, good with the tax cuts and whatnot. But the problem with doing that is it's a one-way transfer. You can dump a whole mountain of funds into corporate accounts without raising any flags as long as you declare the large transfer with the banks beforehand, easily justified with an event such as the one they just hosted. But you can't transfer a mountain of funds _out_ without raising red flags for embezzlement."

It worked brilliantly.

Like a game of chess where Victor had forced his opponents into a choice with inevitably damaging outcomes no matter what decision they made.

If they tried to transfer the money back before the end of the third round, they would be arrested for embezzlement and suspicious activity with undeclared transfers of money. If they did not try to transfer the funds back, they would be arrested for multiple accounts of theft. The money, after all, belonged to various members of the audience, snatched away before the outcome of the bet was even announced. Either way, for whichever crime they were charged with, the audience still got their money back eventually, and the owners still went to jail.

"Let's go," Sara said as she got in the car. "I need to wash cornstarch out of my mouth."

"Aren't you going to stay a bit longer?" Mila asked. "Sign some autographs? You could get a lot of good deals and good money by making connections here."

Sara shook her head, eyes still fixed on the figures the police officers pushed into their cars. She smiled as she watched the flashing strobe lights fade into the distance. "The money isn't a problem. You said it would get back to me eventually."

"Probably even tonight," Victor offered with a smile.

From the backseat, Sara smiled as well, keeping her eyes focused on Mila, whose face broke out into a wide grin. "But this is a non-monetary type of profit."

-::-

"How did they get arrested?" Victor asked later that night.

They were gathered in a circle on Mila's floor again, the building plans of the winery still laid out in front of them. No one had bothered to put them away yet, and the long roll of white paper blended in to the messy floor perfectly. Victor made a mental note to himself to _really_ have a talk with Mila about cleaning up the apartment, which became exponentially messier now that all five of them frequented the place.

"Uh, with handcuffs on their wrists and policemen on either side?" Sara provided. She gave him a shrug and popped a grape into her mouth.

"How do you do that?" Mila asked, frowning at the small plastic bag of grapes in Sara's hands. "Grapes are grapes. How do you tell the difference?"

"Try it," Sara replied, offering the bag. Mila took one hesitantly and placed the grape between her teeth. "You kind of just have to let it speak to you. All grapes have a sugar and tannin level. You can't understand wine unless you understand the grapes, too."

"I don't get it," Mila said, swallowing. "It tastes like a grape. Like a really fruity grape."

Sara laughed.

"It's an acquired taste."

"As is crime," Victor added. "What did they get charged with? I couldn't catch it over the earbuds with all the chaos in the background."

Sara frowned, chewing. She shrugged again. "I don't think they tried to transfer anything back from the corporate accounts, so they didn't get busted for embezzlement. No, the police who did the arresting said something more like improper transfer of money? Unlawful transfer of assets? And theft, obviously."

"Unlawful transfer of funds," Victor answered, smiling. "That's what I was hoping for."

He hadn't been counting on that, not really. Victor had hoped that the winery's manager and the company CEO were smart enough to realize that they couldn't transfer money from corporate accounts without being flagged, or perhaps stupid enough that the option wouldn't even cross their minds in the heat of the panic. Still, he hadn't been willing to bet on that. There were safeguards either way to ensure they both went to jail and that Chris got his life savings back and that Sara got her money, so Victor didn't think too much on that.

At the end of the day, they had done their jobs—all of them. They had pulled off a con by flipping it on its head and turned the odds in a fixed bet. They had impersonated a fake employee, had convinced their marks to not only put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a bank account made under Sara's name, then convinced the same people to transfer all the money away.

But now, the implication of what _might_ have also happened hit Victor, and he struggled to hide his smile.

"Why is that?" Yuuri asked, uncrossing his legs. "Don't they go to jail anyway?"

"Oh, of course. Prison sentences vary, but we don't care about that as much. They'll face a hard time in prison, but after they get out, their business would be in tatters. No one would want to work with them every again. They're unreliable, uninsurable—"

"Broke," Mila provided helpfully.

"Yes, broke. But do you remember what we went over during all the planning? About gambling traditions?"

"Like how they can't bribe the judges so they alter the wines instead?" Chris asked.

"Sort of," Victor replied. He got up now, pacing the room. "Remember how they always created a new account for these bets, the pot of money? And how they always make it under the competitor's name as per tradition? Doing that keeps the responsibility of redistributing the money away from the winery. If the Sara won, then _she_ would be the one responsible for those funds and making sure they got back to their rightful owners. It's like Sara is their scapegoat."

"I'm not a goat," Sara snapped, still frowning. "So there's an empty bank account under my name, but I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"No, not empty." Victor smiled and pointed in her direction. "Not empty at all."

"I don't understand," she said. The plastic bag of grapes dropped to the ground as Sara stood up. "They cleaned out that little pot of money, transferred everything into corporate accounts, remember? There's nothing left."

"This is the _monetary_ profit part of this," Victor explained with a grin.

He had half a mind to not tell the team that he hadn't anticipated this happening, but he thought better of it the last second. It was better to avoid lying, even lies of omission. They needed to trust each other for their future heists and cons to work, and Victor wasn't going to be the one to break that trust.

"I didn't realize this at first, but large transfers of money raise lots of flags."

"But you said it yourself, they can transfer large amounts of money into corporate accounts all the time as long as they clear it with the banks beforehand," Yuuri interrupted. "Why does it matter now?"

"Because the police are involved. The banks watch transfers of money this large to begin with, but the cops reported that the transfer of money was _unlawful_ and _fraudulent_. Obviously, if this worked out the way the winery wanted it to, the money would've been tucked away safely after the outcome of the bet had been declared. Lucky for us, that didn't happen."

Victor saw Mila's eyes widen in understanding. "As soon as the cops called it in as illegal, the banks _froze_ the payment. Fraud invalidates the previous transfer, and ownership reverts back. The money never reached the corporate accounts, not completely anyway."

"And when that happens, the money bounces back," Victor added. "The winery pays the audience what they owe by taking it out of their profits. Or from their savings. They're smart. They'll find another way to scrounge up another seven hundred thousand."

Sara's eyes widened. "So right now, the original seven hundred thousand would be...sitting in that gambling account."

"Not just any gambling account though," Victor said with a grin, completing the puzzle. "The gambling account made under _your name_."

She gave a small scream and started patting at her pockets frantically, searching for her phone. Victor, already a couple steps ahead, simply pulled up the account himself on his own device. He showed the string of numbers to her with a grin.

 _This should be enough to pay off all her debts and still have some left over,_ Victor thought. _She can stop running now._

"It's mine?" she exclaimed. "I don't have to pay any of it back. It's all mine?"

"It's all yours," he answered.

"I can pay off all my debts with this," Sara said, eyes shining and voicing Victor's exact thoughts. "Probably still have some left over."

"Holy shit," Mila whispered softly as she got to her feet, eyes glued to the number on Victor's phone. If Victor didn't know any better, he might've thought that her mouth was watering at the sight of so much money. With a laugh, she wrapped her arms around the wine connoisseur. "Sara, you can take a girl out for dinner with that much monetary profit."


End file.
